An avid though somewhat tongue-tied rap fan, he stumbles on Mumbai’s underground hip-hop scene and is soon hanging out with an already established rapper, Sher (Siddhant Chaturvedi), who acts as a mentor and encourages him to turn his life and experiences into urgent, angry material. His long-term girlfriend, Safeena (highly bankable star Alia Bhatt) is forced to play the good Muslim girl for her mother and doctor father, but reveals a fiery spirit of independence in her far from subordinate romantic rapport with Murad. Murad hangs out with his equally mature besties in a deprived ‘hood that is painted with a certain indulgent community glow – it takes the archly observed visit of a group of Western tourists to bring home the fact that Murad and his family are slum-dwellers. That’s ‘kid’ in a manner of speaking, as little attempt is made to paint the 33-year-old Singh as anything other than a man called Murad who lives in cramped conditions with three generations of his family, soon made even more compact by his bullying chauffeur father’s acquisition of a younger second wife. Playing fast and loose with the facts, the script turns Christian boy Vivian Fernandes, aka Divine, into a Muslim kid living in Mumbai’s notorious Dharavi slum. By Indian indie standards, Gully Boy has the panache to succeed on home territory and among the diaspora community abroad elsewhere, its appeal is likely to be fairly niche.
Yet Singh busts rhymes with the best of them in this energetic, entertaining film that smuggles some urgent social themes in under the cover of a hoary old fable about a handsome pauper who gets the stardom and the girl. Mumbai rapper Divine, whose story the film is loosely based on, looks every inch the part of the hip-hop slum-dweller-turned-star, so it’s difficult to put the casting of a dishy leading man to play him down to anything other than box office. Singh busts rhymes with the best of them in this energetic, entertaining film
Opening in Berlin ahead of its Indian release on February 14, it’s proof that what passes as gritty by Mumbai film industry standards is liable to feel decidedly sanitised to audiences elsewhere – with Bollywood star Ranveer Singh required to do little to establish his street credentials other than throw a hoodie over his perfectly-coiffed hair every so often. The Mumbai rap scene gets the widescreen stamp of approval in Zoya Akhtar’s romantic musical Gully Boy, a Star-Is-Born tale of a kid from the city slums who makes it as a rap star against the odds.
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