Talent, teamwork and tenacity are attributes that, as a rule, occupy centrestage in a sports drama. These qualities come to the aid of a team of hoopsters that fights to beat the odds stacked against it. Add to the proceedings a dash of feel-good, high-spirited humour and periodic tugs at the heartstrings and you have Sitaare Zameen Par, somewhat inconsistent in pace but always entertaining.
The underdog story, scripted by Divy Nidhi Sharma and directed by R.S. Prasanna, pivots around ten neurodiverse basketball players placed under a reluctant coach, an angry not-so-young man in dire need of a course correction.
The team does not get along with the coach. A judge assigns the job to the latter as punishment for ramming his car into a police vehicle in a drunk driving case. Although they find winning ways difficult to come by to begin with, each member of the outfit makes steady progress on and off the basketball court.
There is nothing new in here in terms of story. Sitaare Zameen Par is an official remake of the 2018 Spanish film, Campeones (Champions), which, a few years later, saw a Hollywood iteration with Woody Harrelson in the lead.
The lack of originality does not however take anything away from the incredible performances of the ten first-time actors. In its celebration of diversity and inclusion, Sitaare Zameen Par goes further than any Indian movie ever has.
The process that helps the protagonists develop focus and cohesion is expectedly exacting - no less so than the drill that must have gone into getting the actors ready for the movie camera - and it is around those challenges that the Aamir Khan starrer revolves.
Sitaare Zameen Par blends comedy, emotions and the infectious vitality of a physically tough sport to drive home the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity - physical, mental and societal.
Aamir Khan, back on the big screen three years after the underwhelming Laal Singh Chadda, effortlessly slips into the character of a temperamental man who is often mocked for his short stature. In a fit of rage, he socks the head coach in the face. He is promptly suspended. The knocks that follow are even harder. His ego takes a beating.
Sitaare Zameen Par is about redemption that dawns amid a haze of scepticism. Gulshan (Khan) is in a trough. His wife (Genelia D'Souza) and mother (Dolly Ahluwalia) struggle to keep him away from his questionable impulses.
On the professional front, Gulshan has a reputation to rebuild. He isn't the one who does all the teaching. Unlike the school instructor in Taare Zameen Par (2007) who helps a boy with a learning disability discover himself, he learns from his wards, youngsters drawn from different backgrounds.
Nine boys and a girl, the short-tempered Golu Khan (Simran Mangeshkar), hold up multiple mirrors in which Gulshan can see the avoidable distortions he is in danger of embracing. And, of course, his family pitches in with sage, timely nudges when he needs it, which is well-nigh always.
The broad arc of the story holds no real surprises, but thanks to the way the little deeds of a man navigating his mental blocks pan out, the tale isn't devoid of depth. Sitaare Zameen Par is an uplifting and heartwarming genre film that employs familiar tropes to good effect.
Pretty much like its spiritual predecessor did, the film creates awareness about intellectual disabilities and showcases neuro-atypical youngsters in a manner that strikes an instant chord. It seeks to clear the cobwebs that cloud society's notions of what is normal and what is not.
What Sitaare Zameen Par asserts, without having to go overboard with manipulative methods (which, of course, are inevitable in a movie with an avowed purpose) is that there is nothing unusual about being differently wired like the individuals Gulshan is directed to take under his wings even as he himself tries to fly away from his own ingrained biases.
Ten differently abled actors drive the film into uncharted territory and add genuine wattage to the drama. Aamir Khan, when needed, cedes ground to them without letting his own presence be diminished in any way.
The innate potential of the theme - who does not like underdogs taking on obstacles in their path and marching ahead when nobody, least of all the man who is charged with working with them and showing them the way? - is undeniable. Sitaare Zameen Par makes the most of it.
Aamir Khan is the anchor around which the plot swivels but he isn't a ball hog. The film rests equally on the shoulders of his ten specially-abled co-actors. It is impossible to single out only a handful for special mentions. They are all equally good.
Ayush Bhansali plays a boy who works in a dye factory and is obsessed with giving his hair a different hue every other day. Ashish Pendse is a security guard who Gulshan spots when the two square off in a parking lot. Simran Mangeshkar is cast as a perpetually angry girl and Gopi Krishnan Varma plays Guddu, a boy who avoids a bath like the plague.
Vedant Sharma is Bantu, a reclusive guy given to constantly scratching his ears, Rishab Jain is a gardener who runs a nursery, Aroush Datta is auto mechanic Satbir and Samvit Desai plays hotel employee Kareem. Rishi Shahani's Sharmaji and Naman Mishra's Hargovind, too, are always on the ball.
The director lets the magnificent ten go with the flow. As a consequence, the sort of artifice that is often an intrinsic part of acting is refreshingly missing in these admirably organic performances.
This isn't, of course, the first time that special actors have fronted an Indian film. In 2019, Nikhil Pherwani made Ahaan, in which the titular character was played by Abuli Mamaji, an actor with Down Syndrome.
A year earlier, Bengali filmmaker Soukarya Ghoshal cast an actor with special needs, Mahabrata Basu, in Rainbow Jelly. In a follow-up to that film, Pokkhiraj's Dim (The Unicorn's Egg), released recently, the actor, 17 when the film was shot, reprises the character.
Suresh Triveni's Jalsa (2022) had an actor with cerebral palsy playing a young boy with cerebral palsy and Kaushik Ganguly's Chotoder Chobi (2014) centred on two actors born with dwarfism. But that is where Indian cinema's story of authentic representation of disability grinds to a halt.
That is how it would have remained had the remarkable sitaare of this film not descended in our midst and demonstrated that there is much more to acting than what we are accustomed to. Sitaare Zameen Par is a rousing slam dunk because it has its heart in the right place.
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Aamir Khan, Genelia Deshmukh, Brijendra Kala, Dolly Ahluwalia