24 frames per second

Advait Chandan’s Secret Superstar begins on a train. A bunch of school kids are singing and dancing. The songs range from the raucous to the raunchy. Watching them is a girl who smiles at their antics but doesn’t participate. And when she does sing, it is with her own composition. You suspect that, all this time, while the other girls were singing Beedi jalai le, she was listening to the music in her head.

While the song is of a different ilk, the kind that makes elderly co-passengers smile rather than frown, the girl herself isn’t all sweetness and light. She has a short temper, one that she has to keep in check so assiduously in the presence of her abusive father, that she doesn’t bother to rein it in when in the presence of others. She is assertive, resourceful, brave. And it is evident that she gets at least some of these qualities from a mother (and perhaps also a grandmother) who is equally fascinating in her own right. These are wonderfully textured characters in the midst of a wonderfully written but, alas, not wonderfully told story.

The broad contours of this story are well-known by now: a girl in a middle-class Muslim household wants to become a musician, and starts off by uploading videos of herself in a burqa with a guitar in her hand, singing her own songs. Her work catches the attention of a famous music director in Mumbai. You know how this goes, more or less. But consider all the little moments that one doesn’t expect to see in stories like these. A discussion about a celebrity divorce leads a classmate to gently correct her preconceived notions that all divorces are the result of the husband being an asshole — sometimes, things just don’t work, he says. Or a discussion about whether an abused mother and cowed down daughter could just up and leave without taking her little brother with them — should they try and bring him up in an environment where he learns to be a better man? That this conversation even happens without heightened melodrama is one thing. That there is a moment there where the brother is shown eavesdropping on their conversation is something else entirely.

There is so much here to unpack, that I am left wondering whether to praise the movie for all the little stories it tells at the fringes, or the damn it for its faults. And there are faults, trust me. There are moments of incredible mawkishness (like a late scene with the little brother) that one could’ve done without, but the bigger issue is that you get the sense of seeing a script being filmed rather than a film being made based on a script. I could see a great writer coming up with a story with all this detail, but apart from the odd visual flourish (like a moment in a recording studio with the girl mutely observing the goings-on outside), where is the director in all this? A skilled director and a dispassionate editor would’ve made a much better, shorter film, it feels like.

In all of this discussion, I have left out Aamir Khan. The idea that he will ride in on a white horse in the second half feels more or less pre-ordained, but the horse, and this knight’s armour, aren’t entirely blemish-free. The general idea is that a crass, unpopular music composer turns out to have a soft heart, and in helping this girl, he finds some small measure of redemption himself. But listen to the version of the song he originally wants this schoolgirl to sing, before she cuts out all the moaning and groaning and gets him to propose a sweeter version for her to sing. Maybe all that the film is doing is saying that this is the world she is stepping into, and changing in her own little way. And I can appreciate that.

But watching Aamir Khan do his shtick (and he does it pretty well), my mind kept flashing back to all that I have been reading about Harvey Weinstein and James Toback and… What I couldn’t do is create for myself the soundproof room where I could just hear the music and block out the cacophony outside.