Rockstar, Imtiaz Ali’s take on Devdas—and let’s not pretend it is anything but that—is as flawed as its ‘flawsome (to borrow a coinage from the irrepressible Bae from Call Me Bae) protagonist. Janardhan (Ranbir Kapoor) is a musician by instinct. Janardhan’s abusive treatment of the love of his life Heer (Nargis Fakhri) echoes Devdas’s physical and emotional violence against Paro in Devdas.
If the two ‘antsy' heroes were present in real-time, they would be booked for abuse and violence. They are prisoners of their desires and their non-conformist hankerings to love and hate at the same time. They are like birds fluttering their wings in a gilded cage.
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In Rockstar, Ranbir finds his character’s centre, pulling it out of Jordan’s soul like a baby being brought into the world, kicking, screaming, and protesting. It’s a performance that screams for attention and yet doesn’t really follow any formula of flamboyance to get attention. Beyond the central performance, Rockstar gives us desperately profound insight into the pitfalls of success and stardom.
Ranbir had excitedly told once Nargis Fakhri would get the National Award for her performance. Nargis found that very funny. “They should give the award to the girl who dubbed my voice. I am sure he understood my character better than I did. It was a disappointing time for me. I couldn't share it with my mother. Because she would've just ordered me home. But there was no dearth of work. I was getting these endorsements, shooting magazine covers. But very frankly, Rockstar was too vast an experience and culturally too distant from where I come from for me to handle. I didn’t understand the culture or the milieu. Just imagine—if tomorrow you’re offered the main lead in a big Chinese film where they tell you, you are the ideal choice. That’s exactly how I felt when I was doing Rockstar.”
A clueless Paro is only one of the myriad mountainous obstacles that Rockstar’s protagonist faces in his painful journey from a small town to the rock stadium. The songs, which during the time of the film’s release seemed so revolutionary to some, now sound like anomalies.