The sound mix on the opening street sequence of Ravi Jadhav’s Banjo is just muddy enough to make you reach for the remote before realizing you are sitting in a dark theater where nobody can fix the volume. It is a small thing, but it bugged me from the very start, this strange insistence on burying the dialogue beneath the ambient noise of a Mumbai slum like some well-intentioned indie film trying a bit too hard to be authentic. Hindi films have spent decades figuring out how to balance grit with clarity, yet here we are with a street-level drama that sounds like it was recorded inside a tin bucket tossed down a flight of concrete stairs. Riteish Deshmukh plays Tara, a local musician who leads a crew of ragtag players banging out infectious rhythms on traditional instruments that most mainstream audiences forgot existed outside of Ganpati immersion processions. He has the kind of long hair and loose bandhani shirts that scream Mumbai cool without ever feeling entirely earned by the character arc that follows. Nargis Fakhri shows up soon after as Christina, a New York-based DJ who flies to India with a laptop and a dream of finding the raw, unpolished street sound that will save her flagging career back home. If I'm honest, her arrival signals the exact moment the movie forgets its own dirt and tries to put on a clean shirt for the foreign festival circuit.

Jadhav comes from Marathi cinema where he directed the massive hit Natarang, a project that handled artistic struggle with a bit more structural bone than this glossy attempt to win over multiplex crowds raised on Dharma Productions romances. He tries to frame the slums not as places of squalor or tragedy, but as pulsing engines of rhythm where every dented bucket and rusted pipe becomes a potential drum kit waiting for the right pair of hands. The camera work by Manoj Lobo swoops through narrow alleys with a handheld impatience that occasionally induces mild vertigo while trying to capture the sheer energy of street-level performance. Yet the screenplay, written by Jadhav alongside Nikhil Mehrotra, treats the supporting musicians with the kind of lazy shorthand usually reserved for the hero’s goofy sidekicks in standard Bollywood movies. We get the token fat guy who loves to eat, the angry young rebel who hates rich people, and the wise old mentor who plays the dholak with tears in his eyes while remembering his glory days. They exist entirely to nod enthusiastically whenever Tara hits a particularly soulful chord on his beat-up instrument.

Deshmukh throws himself into the physical demands of the role with a sweaty, desperate enthusiasm that nearly covers up the fact that his character does not actually change from the first frame to the last. He slumps against walls with casual grace, tosses his mane back during instrumental solos, and delivers his lines with the street-smart cadence of a guy who has spent too many afternoons hanging outside a local tea stall. When he looks at Nargis Fakhri with lovestruck devotion, you almost believe he forgets the cameras are rolling, which is more than can be said for his co-star who spends most of her screen time looking like she is desperately trying to remember where she left her passport. Fakhri plays Christina with a flat, transatlantic vocal delivery that remains stubbornly unchanged whether she is reacting to a life-threatening street fight or discovering a musical genius in a gutter. It reminds me of Kareena Kapoor in Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, that fascinating kind of committed detachment where an actor is clearly reading phonetic lines while thinking about lunch. Her dubbing is visibly out of sync in at least three major dramatic sequences, a sloppy editorial oversight that pulls you right out of the emotional stakes.

Vishal-Shekhar provide a soundtrack that works overtime to rescue scenes that are sinking under the weight of their own earnest clichés, blending traditional percussion loops with heavy bass drops designed for club speakers. The title track hits with a certain visceral force when it finally blasts through the speakers during the second half, reminding us why rhythm can sometimes paper over mediocre dialogue. But the recurring acoustic motif—a sad little banjo twang that plays every time Tara looks pensively at a photograph of his estranged father—gets recycled so many times you start timing the intervals between its appearances on your watch. It is a classic trap of commercial Hindi cinema, using music as a crutch to tell the audience what to feel because the script refuses to do the heavy lifting. The lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya bring a lyrical street poetry to the proceedings, though, saving the songs from becoming generic club anthems by grounding them in the dusty realities of working-class survival.

Beneath the romantic subplot and the predictable rags-to-riches trajectory, the film wants to talk about how the corporate music industry swallows up indigenous art forms and spits out sanitized pop for the masses. Christina represents that machinery, well-meaning and polite, yet fundamentally exploitative as she records street musicians without offering them proper contracts or credit until the plot forces her to grow a conscience. The tragedy of the narrative is that it immediately undermines its own radical thesis by suggesting these street artists need a privileged outsider with a MacBook to validate their worth to the rest of the world. Tara does not find success by playing his heart out for the local neighborhood crowd; he has to perform on a high-tech corporate stage surrounded by laser lights and screaming fans who only care about the drop. The socio-economic gap between the slums and South Bombay high-rises is treated as a minor hurdle to be crossed with a catchy beat rather than a structural chasm that keeps people down.

The pacing collapses somewhere around the two-hour mark when the filmmakers decide we need a melodramatic subplot involving loan sharks and local politics that adds nothing to the emotional spine of the story. Characters who seemed important suddenly disappear for twenty minutes at a time while Tara and Christina wander around heritage sites looking photogenic in designer rags. It is not a complete disaster, because Deshmukh has enough personal screen presence to keep you watching even when the narrative wheels are spinning furiously in the mud. He sells the final concert sequence with a sweaty, wild-eyed intensity that makes you wish the rest of the film possessed a tenth of that raw voltage. When the credits finally roll, you are left thinking about how close it came to capturing something genuinely vital about Mumbai street culture before it got smoothed over by mainstream casting choices and slick editing suites.