There is a specific kind of shoulder bag that only male music producers in Mumbai apartment complexes seem to wear, and John Abraham carries one in the opening twenty minutes of "I, Me Aur Main" that looks heavy enough to hold a brick but apparently contains only his character's entire personality. Ishaan Sabharwal is a man who designs album covers for a living and treats his own reflection with the sort of earnest, lingering devotion usually reserved for a deity in a domestic shrine. It is a very specific type of insufferable. If I'm honest, spending time with a guy who checks his hair in the shiny side of a stainless steel water dispenser at an art gallery makes you want to reach into the screen and smudge the glass. Kapil Sharma directs this thing with the visual cadence of a lifestyle magazine spread that has been dragged through a car wash, every apartment gleaming with recessed lighting and neutral-toned throw pillows that nobody ever actually sits on. The script tries to frame Ishaan's chronic narcissism as a charming quirk of modern urban anxiety, but it never quite figures out how to make his realization of wrongdoing feel earned rather than like a mild inconvenience he stumbled into while looking for his car keys.

Hindi films have spent the last decade trying to capture the single-guy-in-the-big-city archetype, usually falling back on the same recycled tropes about commitment phobia and emotional constipation that stopped feeling fresh around the time of "Dil Chahta Hai." Here, the premise feels even thinner because Ishaan lives with Gauri, a stylist played by Prachi Desai who has apparently dedicated her youth to folding his pocket squares and cleaning up after his ego. Desai plays this role with a tight, exhausted patience that suggests she read the script, looked at her character arc, and decided to just anchor herself in reality by sheer force of will. When she finally packs her bags and leaves him over an argument about whether he was listening to her talk about her promotion, the movie tries to treat it like a seismic emotional rupture. But the sound design completely drops the ball on that scene because the background music swells with this overly dramatic piano chord that feels less like heartbreak and more like a cue for a shampoo commercial.

Enter Anushka, played by Chitrangda Singh, who is an architect with an office that looks like an advertisement for concrete flooring and who demands to be taken seriously on her own terms. Singh brings a heavy, grounded gravity to a movie that desperately wants to float away on a cloud of glossy commercial aesthetics. Her scenes with Abraham actually generate a bit of friction because she refuses to play along with his routine of looking slightly wounded and bewildered whenever a woman expects him to remember her birthday. It is too bad the direction keeps pulling back from letting these two actors actually hash out their disagreements without inserting montages of them walking through rain-slicked corporate parks while some generic acoustic guitar strums away in the background. It's a small thing, but the editing on these transitions lingers about two seconds too long on everybody's blank reaction shots, giving the actors nowhere to hide their bewilderment at the pacing.

The cinematography by Himman Dhamija loves lens flare just a little bit too much, turning every kitchen island into a light source and every balcony conversation into a golden-hour dream sequence that doesn't fit the mundane selfishness of the plot. We are supposed to believe that Ishaan is having some sort of existential reckoning as he bounces between his newly single apartment and his mandatory corporate design meetings, but the framing makes his life look like a permanent vacation with better furniture. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with wealth, often using plush interiors as a substitute for character depth, and this picture leans into that habit with almost aggressive enthusiasm. Every shirt John Abraham wears is ironed to within an inch of its life. Even when he is supposed to be hitting rock bottom, his stubble looks like it was mapped out by a continuity supervisor with a ruler.

The supporting cast features Raima Sen and Mini Mathur in roles that exist primarily to throw exposition at the screen while holding wine glasses, which feels like a waste of comic timing. Whenever the film needs to explain why Ishaan is the way he is, someone from his past shows up to deliver a brief monologue about family expectations or artistic freedom that sounds like it was written during a lunch break on the studio backlot. You can almost feel the editors rushing to stitch these pieces together before the reel runs out, leaving massive narrative gaps where actual emotional growth should be taking place. It is the kind of storytelling where characters learn their lessons not through living through consequences, but by having a very serious conversation in a coffee shop that serves overpriced salads.

John Abraham has limitations as an actor, and this project exposes all of them without offering much cover from the direction or the screenplay. When he tries to look boyish and repentant, he mostly just looks confused by the lighting, like a dog trying to comprehend a magic trick. Yet, there is a weird, stubborn commitment to his own vanity that keeps him watchable even when the character is being an absolute disaster of a human being. He does not try to make Ishaan likeable right away, which is perhaps the smartest choice made in the entire production. He just leans into the smugness until the script forces him to drop it.

Hindi movies of this scale often forget that urban audiences want to see some version of their actual lives on screen, not just a glossy highlight reel of people who have never worried about utility bills or traffic jams on the Western Express Highway. The soundtrack by Sachin-Jigar features one particular romantic ballad that repeats so often during scene changes that you start to feel personally harassed by the flute melody. It plays when he is sad, it plays when he is happy, and it even plays quietly in the background of a hardware store scene where he is buying a new lightbulb. The lack of acoustic variety in the sound design flattens out whatever dramatic tension the actors manage to build in the quieter moments between dialogue exchanges.

There is an interesting conversation to be had about male emotional labor in modern relationships, but this script is far too timid to actually start it. It prefers to keep things safely inside the realm of romantic comedy tropes where nobody says anything too damaging and everyone gets a clean slate by the time the credits roll. Prachi Desai deserves a better movie that utilizes her steady, unfussy screen presence instead of reducing her to a moral compass for a man-child who needs to learn how to do his own laundry. Chitrangda Singh manages to carve out a few moments of genuine autonomy before the narrative pulls her back into the gravitational pull of the leading man's redemption arc. It is not a complete disaster, but it drifts through your brain like an airport novel you read on a short flight and forget before you even hit baggage claim.

Closing out a narrative about personal growth without actually letting the protagonist change in any meaningful way is a bold gamble, but the film pulls it off by simply ending abruptly while everyone is still standing around looking mildly annoyed. There is no grand epiphany on a train platform. There is no sweeping musical number where all the ex-girlfriends wave goodbye from the tarmac. Ishaan just sits at his drafting table, looks at his newly rearranged workspace, and decides to stop staring at his own face in the glass for at least five minutes. It is a very small victory for a very small man, and the movie is perhaps honest enough to leave it right there without trying to make him a hero.