Sushant Singh Rajput does something with his jaw in the middle of the third reel of MS Dhoni: The Untold Story that makes you forget, for about four seconds, that you are watching a movie star impersonate a living demigod. It is a slight, sideways jut of the lower mandible, caught on a medium-close lens as he waits for a throw from the deep during a grueling domestic fixture in Kharagpur, and if I'm honest, it is the only time the three-hour runtime feels genuinely earned rather than merely endured. Neeraj Pandey has never been a director interested in the poetry of sport. He likes the logistics. He likes the paperwork. His camera tracks the bureaucratic machinery of selection committees and railway ticket windows with the same cold, observant eye he brought to A Wednesday, treating the rise of India's most successful cricket captain not as a mythological ascent but as a grueling succession of transit forms and ledger entries that had to be filled out correctly if the protagonist was ever going to see the other side of a dusty platform.

The screenplay takes its sweet time getting past the childhood years, which is usually where biopics go to die in a pool of sentimental syrup and digitally scrubbed skin tones. We get the usual tropes of the middle-class Ranchi upbringing—the strict father played with a wonderful, weary rigidity by Anupam Kher, the supportive mother, the dusty school grounds where local bowlers try to knock a kid's block off just to see if he can take it. But Pandey keeps grounding these scenes in physical friction rather than emotional grandstanding. The sound design during the early net sessions is particularly brutal, the leather of the ball making a wet, heavy thud against the willow that tells you everything you need to know about the lack of padding and proper coaching available to kids from the hinterlands. There is a strange, jarring cut right after young Dhoni hits a particularly aggressive cover drive that jumps forward three years without any interstitial breathing room, and it is a small thing but it bugged me because it robs the narrative of a smooth temporal bridge just to hurry us along to the railway station sequences.

Then comes the romance, and the film takes a noticeable narrative dip that it only barely recovers from once the whites are pulled back on. Disha Patani enters as the tragic first love, looking gorgeous and performing with a flatness that suggests she was directed entirely through hand gestures from behind the monitors. Her scenes with Rajput are shot through a soft, Vaseline-smeared lens that belongs in a completely different movie, maybe a standard-issue romantic drama from the late nineties rather than a hard-nosed sporting biography. The emotional stakes here feel manufactured, grafted onto a man who otherwise seems to process every major life event like an accountant checking a column of figures. When she exits the narrative, the film breathes a collective sigh of relief and gets back to the business of hitting sixes over mid-wicket. Kiara Advani fares much better later on as Sakshi, bringing a sharp, conversational banter that actually manages to crack the stoic shell Rajput has built around the character, though their courtship is rushed through with the breathless urgency of a montage that has somewhere important to be.

Rajput’s physical transformation is the anchor holding this bloated ship together against the wind. He spent months studying actual match footage, looping the same three seconds of the trademark helicopter shot until his wrists ached, and that obsessive repetition bleeds into his posture on screen. He walks with a slight slouch, his shoulders rolled forward under the weight of expectations he never asked for, staring at the turf between his spikes whenever someone tries to ask him about his captaincy philosophy. He is operating on a completely different frequency from the rest of the ensemble, many of whom seem to think they are performing in a loud television commercial for a brand of motor oil or cement. When he sits in the dressing room after being run out for a duck on his international debut against Bangladesh, his face goes entirely blank, a terrifying kind of emptiness that feels closer to actual trauma than anything you typically see in mainstream Hindi movies where actors are required to cry on cue for the gallery.

The cinematography by Santosh Thundiyil relies heavily on a muddy, desaturated palette that makes Ranchi look like a place where the sun only comes out when it absolutely has to, though the stadium sequences later on open up into harsh, stadium-light blues and artificial whites that sear the retina. The VFX used to composite Rajput’s face onto archival footage of the 2011 World Cup final at the Wankhede Stadium is surprisingly competent for a mid-budget Indian production, though you can still spot the seam lines around his ears if you are looking for them during the final sixer. A minor gripe with the sound mixing involves the recurring use of the same identical crowd roar every single time a boundary is struck, a loop that starts to sound like a malfunctioning refrigerator if you listen to it too closely through a decent set of theater speakers.

What saves the project from becoming a hagiography is its stubborn refusal to explain why MS Dhoni is the way he is. Most cinematic biographies feel the urgent need to tie every character quirk back to a childhood trauma or a defining inspirational speech delivered by a mentor in a rainstorm. Here, the protagonist remains an absolute mystery right up until the credits roll over a shot of the real man walking out to bat. He is a collection of habits, a set of reflexes, a man who treats winning a World Cup with the same stoic indifference he once brought to collecting tickets at Kharagpur railway station. It is a messy, overlong piece of work that could have easily lost forty minutes on the editing floor without missing a beat of its central arc, yet it captures the exhausting, repetitive grind of ambition in a way few other Bollywood releases have managed to pull off in recent memory.