There is a specific kind of side-eye that Rajkummar Rao gives a puddle in this movie that I think about far too often. It happens right around the hour mark when his character, a downtrodden printing press worker forced into playing a swaggering ruffian, realizes he is completely out of his depth. He doesn't look at the other actors. He looks down at his shoes, then at the dirty water, and lets out a long sigh that sounds like a punctured tire. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how quickly the scene cut away from that specific face because I wanted to live in his misery for another five seconds. Ashwariy Pandit's editing is mostly snappy, but sometimes it trims the meat right off the bone just to keep the pacing brisk, which is a curse that plagues half of all modern Hindi films released in any given calendar year.

Director Nitesh Tiwari co-wrote the screenplay with Shreyas Jain and Nitesh's own brother, and they adapted a French novel called The Ingredients of Love into the dusty lanes of Uttar Pradesh without losing the dirt under its fingernails. You can feel the heat radiating off the brick walls in Bareilly. The language actually sounds like people talking when they aren't trying to impress a script coordinator in Versova. Kriti Sanon plays Bitti, a smoking, breakdancing, book-reading rebel who refuses to marry the dullards her mother lines up for her. She finds a paperback novel tucked into a railway station platform stall that features a heroine who behaves precisely like her. That coincidence is the narrative engine. The author is anonymous, but the book points toward a local tough named Pritam Vidrohi. Bitti sets out to find him because she assumes anyone who writes with that much contempt for conventional femininity must be her soulmate.

Enter Ayushmann Khurrana as Chirag Dubey, a local printing press owner who actually wrote the book under a pen name to break the heart of an ex-girlfriend who dumped him for a more prosperous suitor. Chirag is a petty, insecure schemer who wants to use Rao's timid, henpecked Pritam as a meat-shield to woo Bitti without taking any of the social fallout. Khurrana has this knack for playing insecure men who think they are the smartest person in any given room, which he also perfected in Ankhon Dekhi era ensemble pieces if we are reaching for comparisons. He wears cardigans in the Uttar Pradesh summer with a sweaty desperation that makes you want to hand him a handkerchief and a court summons. When he watches Bitti and Pritam interact, his eyes narrow into tiny slits of pure spite. He isn't a romantic hero. He's an overgrown teenager who hasn't realized that the world doesn't revolve around his rejected manuscripts.

Rajkummar Rao enters the picture about forty minutes in and promptly eats the entire production design, the supporting cast, and most of the upholstery. Pritam starts out as a trembling clerk who speaks in a high-pitched whimper and lets his boss walk all over him. Once Chirag and Bitti's friends get hold of him, they give him a leather jacket, slick his hair back with mustard oil, and teach him how to walk like a movie villain who just robbed a bicycle. Rao plays both versions of Pritam with such physical precision that you forget they are the same human being. When he tries to act tough in front of Bitti’s gun-toting father, his entire ribcage expands like a startled pigeon before he immediately collapses back into his natural slouch. It is broad comedy, sure, but it's anchored by a genuine sense of social terror that keeps it from turning into a cartoon. The movie belongs to him the second he opens his mouth and lets out that sheepish, terrified bleat.

The cinematography by Satyajit Pande avoids the glossy, candy-coated look that ruins most romantic comedies coming out of Mumbai these days. The light actually looks like tubelight and afternoon glare through dirty window panes. The colours are dusty yellows, faded blues, and the bruised purple of twilight over a railway siding. When characters talk on rooftops, you can see the laundry fluttering on clotheslines three blocks away, giving the town a lived-in texture that CGI backlots can never quite replicate. Even the soundtrack by Vayu and Arko resists the urge to pump synthesized pop into emotional scenes, relying instead on rustic acoustic guitars and harmoniums that drift in from off-camera like background noise at a local tea stall. There is a recurring flute motif that plays whenever Bitti rides her bicycle past the market, and while I wouldn't call it subtle, it doesn't overstay its welcome quite as badly as the comic relief uncle who keeps popping up to shout advice about marriage.

What keeps this from being just another standard-issue romantic comedy is the underlying cruelty in the friendships. Bollywood movies usually treat local squads of sidekicks as loyal, unquestioning cheerleaders who exist only to deliver punchlines and catch people when they fall. Here, Chirag’s best friend Munna, played with delightful exasperation by Pankaj Tripathi, regards him with the weary patience of a man babysitting a particularly stupid terrier. Tripathi doesn't get many dramatic monologues, but he has this recurring habit of checking his watch while Chirag is having an existential meltdown about his love life. That dynamic prevents the central deception from feeling entirely weightless. Everyone is using everyone else for their own amusement or romantic desperation, and the town itself operates on a tight network of gossip where privacy is a myth and every local vegetable vendor knows your romantic history before you do.

Bitti herself could easily have been written as a standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl designed solely to fix the male characters' broken egos, but Sanon plays her with a stubborn lack of sentimentality. She doesn't smile to look cute; she smirks because she knows she's the smartest person in the courtyard and everyone else is too blind to see it. Her introduction involves her sitting on a railway track smoking a bidi and watching a train go by with a look of profound boredom on her face. If I'm honest, the whole cigarette-smoking rebel trope is a bit of a lazy shorthand for female emancipation in Hindi cinema, but Sanon wears it with enough casual indifference that it stops feeling like a statement from the writer's room. She just looks like someone who is sick of eating aloo paratha and listening to her mother complain about her horoscope.

The third act relies on the usual flurry of misunderstandings, rushed train station departures, and public confessions that threaten to stretch the logic of a small town where everyone shares a wall. You do start to wonder why nobody just sits down for five minutes to talk about who actually wrote the damn book. Yet the performances keep pulling the carriage out of the mud every time the plot starts to skid. When Pritam finally snaps at Chirag in the middle of a crowded wedding reception, the sheer volume of his pent-up frustration makes the contrived plotting worth sitting through. It’s an unglamorous little film about petty people behaving badly in a dusty corner of the north, and it refuses to offer any grand takeaways about modern romance or the state of the nation.