Rajkummar Rao blinks too much in the first twenty minutes of Srikanth, and if I am honest, it took me a while to stop noticing it. He plays Srikanth Bolla, the visually impaired industrialist who built a massive packaging empire after fighting school boards and state governments that tried to tell him blind kids belong in the back room learning how to weave cane baskets instead of sitting in science lecture halls. It is a biopic, naturally, but it avoids the usual bronze-statue stiffness that usually turns these things into glorified Wikipedia pages with a budget. Tushar Hiranandani directs with a sort of restless, caffeinated energy that occasionally drops a scene right onto its face when it tries to rush a transition, especially in the middle act where years pass by in the span of three quick montages and a costume change. The screenplay by Jagdeep Sidhu and Sumit Purohit keeps finding these jagged little corners in what could have been a very smooth, very boring inspirational arc, preferring to show us Srikanth being genuinely annoying, stubborn, and abrasive rather than turning him into a saint who only ever smiles patiently through adversity. He wants money, he wants a company, he wants to build an empire, and he doesn’t much care if his ambition makes people uncomfortable.

Rao is doing heavy lifting here without any of the visible groaning that usually accompanies actors playing people with physical disabilities. He doesn't go for the big, Oscar-clip showstoppers. Instead, he anchors the performance in small, prickly mechanics—the way he tilts his head to catch the angle of a voice, or how he grips the edge of a mahogany desk when someone tells him no. It reminds me a bit of what he did in Trapped, that claustrophobic survival exercise where he spent two hours trying not to die in an empty high-rise apartment, but with a lot more volume and a lot more business school swagger. Opposite him, Jyotika plays his fierce, pragmatic mentor Devaki, bringing a grounded, no-nonsense authority that keeps the movie from floating away on clouds of pure sentimentality. She anchors the emotional core with a few sideways glances and dry line deliveries that cut through the melodrama before it has time to pool on the floor. Alaya F shows up as Swathi, Srikanth's partner, and she has this difficult job of playing the person who has to ground an absolute force of nature without looking like a prop, and mostly she pulls it off even when the script starts treating her like a walking plot device who only exists to remind him to call his mother.

The cinematography by Pratik Deora has this hyper-saturated, Mumbai-sunlight glare that makes even the corporate boardrooms look like they are sweating, though there is one recurring drone shot of a highway that feels like it was lifted straight from a stock footage library just to pad out the runtime between scenes. As for the soundtrack by Tanishk Bagchi and Sachet-Parampara, it commits the cardinal sin of Hindi films by hammering the exact same emotional cue three separate times in forty minutes until you want to throw something at the screen. Yet the movie’s real muscle isn't in its aesthetic polish. It's in the way it handles corporate bureaucracy not as an abstract evil but as a series of small, grinding indignities—the forms you can't fill out because the box for visual impairment doesn't have an equivalent category, the venture capitalists who won't look you in the eye because they assume you need a handler, the endless committee meetings where well-meaning bureaucrats tell you that your ambitions are unrealistic for someone in your position. Bharat Jadhav brings a wonderfully weary patience to his role as the sympathetic politician who tries to help through the back channels, and his scenes with Rao have this prickly, unhurried rhythm that feels genuinely lived-in rather than storyboarded.

Bollywood movies have a long, slightly embarrassing history of turning disability into either a tragic punchline or a floating halo of pure spirituality, and Srikanth actively pokes at that tradition without making a huge academic point about it. Srikanth doesn't want your pity, and more importantly, the film doesn't ask for it. When he loses his temper—which happens frequently, loudly, and without much regard for polite company—the camera doesn't rush in to excuse him by reminding us of what he's been through. It just lets him be wrong. That willingness to let the protagonist be unlikeable for stretches is what keeps the enterprise afloat when the plotting gets predictable and the inspirational speeches start sounding like they were generated by a LinkedIn algorithm designed to harvest likes from middle managers. It’s messy in the way real ambition is messy, full of broken partnerships, bruised egos, and victories that taste faintly of ash.

There is a specific sequence near the end involving a labor dispute at the manufacturing plant that cuts away just one beat too early from a security guard's face, a minor editing hiccup that threw me out of the scene entirely, but by that point, the momentum was already doing the work. You stop worrying about whether the film is hitting all the right biographical notes and just watch Rao chew through the dialogue with that specific, rat-a-tat delivery he has perfected over the years. It isn't a masterpiece of modern cinema, and it occasionally trips over its own earnestness when it tries to explain capitalism to people who came for a tearjerker, but it refuses to coast on easy tears. When the credits finally drop, you feel like you've spent two and a half hours in a room with someone who wouldn't let you leave until he sold you a box of biodegradable plates, and honestly, that's a lot more entertaining than another three-hour lecture on how to be a good person.