Rock On
Synopsis:
About halfway through Rock On, Farhan Akhtar is standing in the middle of this upscale Mumbai recording studio wearing a totally ridiculous oversized brown leather jacket that looks like it cost a fortune yet somehow makes him look like an absolute dork, and he's just screaming into a microphone because his bandmates won't talk to each other and everything is falling apart right in front of our eyes. But to understand why a successful corporate guy is losing his mind over a microphone, you have to look at how this whole mess started years ago when they were just a bunch of broke twenty-somethings hanging out in smelly rehearsal rooms drinking cheap chai and dreaming about changing the landscape of hindi movies forever. Back then they were called Magik, and they were the coolest indie rock outfit in the country even though they couldn't pay their rent on time, and they had this intense lead singer named Aditya, played by Farhan with so much brooding intensity that you half expect him to punch a hole through the nearest drywall, and then there was Arjun Rampal playing Joe who was the brooding lead guitarist with the long hair and the permanent scowl who just stares at everyone like they owe him money, and Purab Kohli as Killer the goofy drummer who always has a cigarette behind his ear, and Luke Kenny as Rob the keyboardist who is the absolute glue holding these four hotheads together. They were the kind of band that could've taken over the entire world of bollywood movies if they didn't have massive egos and a tendency to implode over the dumbest things imaginable. So then they record this demo tape that gets them a real record deal, and they finally get a shot at shooting a big music video, but right when they're on the absolute verge of making it big, everything goes completely sideways because Aditya's jealousy and a stupid fight over a girl and a record producer completely poisons the well, and Joe accuses Aditya of selling out and ruining their sound, and Rob tries to mediate but fails miserably, and they have this massive screaming match in the rain where they literally throw their instruments in the mud and swear they'll never speak to each other again. Boom. Done. Ten years pass in the blink of an eye.
Anyway, fast forward a decade and everyone's stuck in boring adult lives where they wear gray suits and pretend to care about quarterly projections. Farhan's character Aditya is now a high-powered executive married to Sakshi, played by Prachi Desai who is super sweet and supportive even when he comes home late smelling like stale whiskey and corporate anxiety, and she keeps finding these old guitar picks in his coat pockets and has no idea what they mean because he never talks about his rock star past. The funny thing is, Prachi Desai brings so much quiet warmth to the screen that you instantly buy why this high-strung corporate shark actually loves her, even if he's emotionally unavailable most of the time. Right after that, Rob gets sick. Like, really sick. And before he kicks the bucket, he secretly gets back in touch with all the guys and convinces them to put their stupid decade-old grudge in the garbage where it belongs and play one last reunion gig for old time's sake. So then Aditya has to go face Joe, who's now running a failing high-end guitar shop and drowning in debt while his girlfriend Debbie, played brilliantly by Koel Puri with this fabulous mix of fierce loyalty and exhaustion, tries to keep him from selling his last prized Stratocaster just to pay the electricity bill. Arjun Rampal plays this bitter, broken-down rocker so well that you forget he used to be a supermodel, just slouching around in worn-out jeans and glaring at anyone who mentions the old days. When Aditya walks into that dusty guitar shop and asks Joe to play again, Joe basically tells him to piss off and get lost, but Aditya doesn't give up because he's stubborn as a mule, and honestly, the way they hash out their decade-old trauma in the middle of a noisy Mumbai street while traffic honks at them is just peak drama for hindi films. They eventually patch things up after a lot of yelling, and Killer and Rob get on board too, and suddenly they're back in a smelly garage sweating over their old chord progressions like they're twenty years old again, which brings a whole new kind of chaotic energy into their quiet married lives. Sakshi gets confused and a little hurt because Aditya is suddenly missing dinner and staying out all night with his old bros, but she realizes he's finally happy for the first time since she met him, so she backs off and lets him rock out.
They book a small gig at a local club, and even though they're super rusty and make a ton of mistakes during the first few songs, the crowd goes wild because raw passion beats perfection every single time. They sound great. They get signed for a major music festival, and everything seems to be moving upward until Rob's health takes a massive turn for the worse and he collapses right before they're supposed to hit the main stage, and it's devastating because they know they're losing their brother. They play the biggest concert of their lives with tears streaming down their faces while Rob watches from the wings, and the music swells up so loud you can barely hear yourself think. The band takes their final bow together on stage, holding hands while the crowd roars.
The acoustic guitar that opens Rock On sounds like it was tracked in a cupboard, thin and aggressively dry, and if I'm honest that's the best thing about it because it reminds you immediately that these characters are not rock gods yet, just four guys who once yelled into Shure mics in a damp suburban garage and never quite figured out how to stop missing it.
Abhishek Kapoor directs this mess with a strange, nervous energy that actually serves the material well since he refuses to shoot the band's reunion like a glossy commercial, choosing instead to let the camera shake during rehearsal scenes and crowd around the edges of rooms where people are arguing about royalty splits and mortgage payments. The screenplay has a loose, baggy quality that lets scenes breathe past the point where a tighter studio picture would have cut away to a montage, which means we get long stretches of dialogue about nothing in particular, characters chewing on cold sandwiches while complaining about sound engineers, and Arjun Rampal standing by a window looking like he would rather be literally anywhere else in the world, which completely works for Joseph.
Farhan Akhtar's transition into acting received a ridiculous amount of pre-release skepticism that looks even sillier now, mostly because he doesn't try to give you some grand, movie-star performance filled with dramatic tears, and instead just plays Aditya with the tired, pinched expression of a man who sold his soul to an advertising firm and forgot to check the receipt. He walks through his glass-walled office with his shoulders hunched, a guy who swallowed his ambition somewhere around his thirtieth birthday and now spends his evenings drinking single malt in silence while his wife tries to figure out why he looks so hollowed out.
Prachi Desai plays his wife Sakshi with a quiet, observant stiffness that prevents the marriage from turning into standard Hindi cinema melodrama, giving us small moments like the way she taps her fingers against a coffee mug while waiting for him to finish an eight-minute work call that make you believe they've lived in that sterile apartment for five years. Then there's Luke Kenny, who mostly exists to nod sagely and hit the hi-hat at the right moment, though he gets one great scene where he argues about keyboard settings with a teenager that feels intensely, painfully real.
The cinematography by Jason West does something interesting with Mumbai light, stripping away the golden-hour gloss you usually get in contemporary Hindi films and replacing it with fluorescent office hums and the muddy yellow glare of streetlights through rain-streaked car windows. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's soundtrack carries half the narrative weight here, though it's a small thing but it bugged me that they use the exact same snare fill every single time the band transitions into the chorus of the title track, a repetitive little tic that starts to grate by the third time they play it at a corporate gig.
Farhan Akhtar's singing voice has a raspy, untrained edge that completely sells the illusion that this is a guy who hasn't practiced in a decade, sounding less like a professional playback singer and more like someone shouting over a jukebox at two in the morning. When he hits a slightly flat note during the bridge of Sinbad the Sailor, you don't cringe, you just believe it, because a real garage band wouldn't sound pristine after ten years off the road.
Shahana Goswami does heavy lifting as Debbie, Arjun Rampal's fiercely protective partner, bringing a raw, lived-in anger to scenes that could easily have devolved into nagging, and she shares a kitchen argument with Rampal that feels like it was lifted straight out of John Cassavetes' Faces minus the art-house pretension. These people aren't fighting about destiny or artistic integrity; they are fighting about credit card bills and the fact that Joseph pawned his guitar amplifier to pay for a cousin's medical procedure.
The middle stretch sags in a way that feels authentically frustrating, mirroring the dead time between gigs when nobody is calling and the rehearsal space landlord is threatening to lock the door, and the narrative almost grinds to a halt during a subplot involving a missing bass guitar that goes on for two scenes too many. Purab Kohli brings a goofy, lanky enthusiasm to Killer that keeps the energy from dropping into complete gloom, bouncing around the room like a golden retriever who doesn't understand why the older boys are sad.
There's an odd echo of Dil Chahta Hai hanging over the entire project, though where Farhan Akhtar's directorial debut was all breezy Goa vacations and bright blue skies, this one feels gray and bruised, like the morning after a party where everybody drank cheap whiskey and said things they couldn't take back. It looks at the specific brand of middle-class male arrested development that plagues urban India without turning it into a comedy and without offering any neat resolutions.
By the time they finally get up on that club stage for the climax, sweaty and terrified and completely out of practice, the movie hasn't transformed them into heroes, and they still look like guys who have to wake up for morning meetings on Monday.