That sound in the middle reel where the optical track pops right over Nasir’s dialogue about the fake blood budget is probably going to be blamed on theater projection by anyone who sees it at a festival, but I am entirely convinced it was baked into the print because nobody cared enough to fix it.

Reema Kagti takes the true story of Nasir Shaikh and his gang of amateur filmmakers from the dust-choked power looms of Maharashtra and builds something that actually feels lived-in instead of researched by a team of interns who read three old articles from Scroll and watched a bunch of making-of footage on YouTube. It is not great all the way through, and there are long stretches in the middle where the narrative sort of bogs down in repetitive scenes of men arguing about cardboard props and whether they can afford four meters of black cloth for a ninja costume, but when it clicks, it reminds you why people ever fell in love with movies in the first place, even if most hindi movies made today wouldn't know a spool of 35mm if it bit them on the ankle.

Adarsh Gourav plays Nasir with a kind of frantic, rabbit-eyed intensity that feels miles away from the calculated awkwardness he brought to The White Tiger, leaning into a perpetual state of half-panicked inspiration where every single problem from a blown fuse to an actor running away to get married in another district is treated like an extinction-level event for local art. He doesn't play him as an inspirational visionary because real people who make zero-budget parodies of Hollywood blockbusters in small towns usually just look tired and smell faintly of cheap tea and sweat, and Gourav captures that specific odor of exhaustion without ever winking at the audience to let us know he knows how ridiculous the whole enterprise is. Beside him, Shashank Arora brings a totally different energy as the resident eccentric who handles cinematography with a homemade rig made from bicycle parts and sheer stubbornness, treating every panning shot of a buffalo-filled alleyway like it's Roger Deakins lighting Blade Runner 2049, while Vineet Kumar Singh shows up later to chew the scenery as a local financier with questionable teeth and even more questionable taste in action choreography.

The cinematography by Tanay Satam deserves a mention here, though I have to say the constant use of those heavily saturated, sun-bleached digital filters gets really old by the time they start shooting their version of Superman, looking less like a conscious artistic choice and more like someone left the default look-up table on during the grade and forgot to turn it off before heading to lunch. Still, when the camera actually settles down and just watches these kids rig a homemade crane out of scaffolding and a rusted pulley, there is a rough, kinetic grace to the framing that doesn't feel manufactured in a post-production suite in Bandra. The soundtrack by Anupam Roy weaves together local percussion and tinny synthesizer themes that sound like they were recorded on a Casio keyboard from 1994, which completely works for the makeshift aesthetic even if the main hero theme repeats about four too many times during the second act montage.

What keeps the film from sliding into the usual poverty-porn trap where suburban filmmakers pat themselves on the back for noticing that poor people also have dreams is its total lack of sentimentality about the process of making art. Nobody in Malegaon is making a political statement when they strap a cardboard cape to a local kid and dangle him from a laundry line; they are doing it because they are bored out of their minds, the electricity goes out for six hours every afternoon, and making a movie is better than sitting around waiting for the loom factory to reopen. That refusal to elevate these grease-stained enthusiasts into saints gives the comedy its actual bite, because the movie is willing to laugh at how genuinely terrible their early test screenings are, with audiences walking out or throwing peanut shells at the screen while Nasir sits in the back row sweating through his polyester shirt.

Bollywood movies have spent the last decade trying to manufacture this kind of grassroots authenticity with massive budgets and CGI streets that look like video game levels, which makes the dusty reality on display here feel almost radical by comparison, even when the dialogue dips into clunky exposition to explain plot points that were already obvious three scenes ago. It is a small thing, but the subtitling during the rapid-fire Marathi and Urdu banter misses the specific cadence of the regional slang, flattening out the insults into standard-issue cinematic snark that feels like it was translated by someone who learned the language from a textbook.

Nobody in this town is talking about breaking barriers or inspiring the next generation of creators, and that is precisely why the film works as well as it does, because their ambitions are small, specific, and entirely ridiculous, like wanting to see a local mechanic punch a villain through a fake brick wall that crumbles too early. When the screening finally happens in a packed, sweaty community hall with the projector bulb flickering on the verge of total collapse, you aren't watching a triumph of the human spirit or any of that other awards-season nonsense, you are just watching a bunch of tired people look up at a wall and see themselves slightly larger than life, which is usually enough.