“In an opera colosseum in Prague, an audience, mostly of white men and women, watches entranced, as Janardan from Pitampura, now Jordan the rockstar in harem pants and a modified Gandhi topi, sing a Punjabi sufi-rock song. As an event, there’s absolutely nothing amiss here. Everybody listens to anything. Except in the film Rockstar, it is a moment of perfect unease.
Jordan is the highest-selling artist of an Indian record company named Platinum Records, which is manned by a Punjabi who also sells pop versions of Hindu mata ki chowki chants. He is a boy from Pitampura who made it big. He is embittered in love. And he sings beautiful Punjabi-Sufi blues. How does he become the musical prodigy the world listens to? Largely by being forced to keep away from the woman he loves—Heer, a Kashmiri woman who is now married and lives in a castle in Prague. His music has soulful venom; it’s beautiful music. But he is certainly not a rockstar who can swing a gig at Prague and have millions throng it—the film so far does not justify or explain it, except that he has to be in Prague to find his love back. The hysterical fans just happen to be waiting there for Delhi’s Jordan.
Creative license is a wonderful thing. But in a film like Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, which just about sketches journey of a musician, and focuses on his emotional derailment, this is a strikingly awkward and convenient point in the story. ”
“There are many such contrivances in the film. The story is simplistic and shallow. Janardan, a college student in Delhi, is a misfit in his family of petty businessmen. He dreams of fame, the Jim Morrison kind of fame and the only man who is his patron (who later becomes his agent) tells him he can’t transcend to great artistry because he has never experienced real pain. Hence he has no keeda. In search of a heartbreak, he goes up to Heer, the college beauty, and asks her to be his girlfriend. First, heartbreak is hard to come by. They have a jolly good time drinking country liquor and watching Junglee Jawani, a soft-porn classic, in an Old Delhi theatre. Finally, Jordan finds his pain and soul—not close to the classic rockstar (no addictions to kind of substances, of course), he is a vile, whimsical and angry lover who happens to be a musician. On the stage, Jordan’s guitar is magically free of any wired entrapments—a howler, anyone who has ever seen any live music performance will tell you.
The film’s structure in the first half is non-linear. There is even a flashback within a flashback. Ali might have intended it, but to-and-fro narrative is not seamless. Some of the transitions and jumps are jarring. Ali is an intuitive and witty cinema writer, as evident in his earlier two films films Socha Na Tha and Jab We Met. Here, his writing is haphazard—a great, potent scene often follows a dodgy, formulaic one.
Kapoor is the film’s strength and its only real propeller. He makes the transition from innocence to anger and cynicism with ease. He brings a tension to an otherwise unrealized role. Long after you’ve watched Rockstar, this character will stay with you. Nargis Fakhiri, the debutante, cast opposite Jordan, is a pout. Completely bereft of acting abilities and without a powerful screen presence, it is a pointless debut. The supporting cast is quite insignificant too.”