Aamir Khan’s Sweet Sports Dramedy

In a career spanning 37 years and over 50 features, there have been few instances when Aamir Khan has been outshined in a film. His acting prowess, enduring stardom and usually impeccable creative instincts have held him in good stead. But in Sitaare Zameen Par (Stars on Earth), the actor-producer becomes a second lead to a group of spunky, neurodivergent, mostly debutant actors who steal every scene they are in.  

Casting directors Tess Joseph and Anmol Ahuja have done a superb job, and Ashish Pendse as Sunil, Aroush Datta as Satbir, Aayush Bhansali as Lotus, Rishi Shahani as Sharma Ji, Gopi Krishnan K Verma as Guddu, Rishabh Jain as Raju, Vedant Sharma as Bantu, Samvit Desai as Kareem, Naman Misra as Hargovind and Simran Mangeshkar as Golu — a player whose preferred strategy in competitive situations is kicking her opponent between the legs — are all pitch perfect, yet individually distinctive. This is a group of smart, resilient and cheerfully irreverent people who definitely don’t want your pity. One of my favorite moments in the film is an exchange between two of them about a girlfriend who happens to be a sex worker. As the film’s tagline says, “Sabka apna apna normal hai” (“everyone has their own normal”).

Remaking the 2018 Spanish movie Champions, director R. S. Prasanna and writer Divy Nidhi Sharma replay the beats and lines almost exactly. But there is a new scene in the second half in which Gulshan (Khan) tries to process a situation with his mother, Preeto (Dolly Ahluwalia Tewari), and what Prasanna and Divy Nidhi Sharma have added is so sparkling that I wish they had recreated the earlier movie with more abandon.

Sitaare Zameen Par tells the story of a prickly, unlikable basketball coach who after a DUI is ordered by a judge to train neurodivergent adults as community service, rather than go to jail. Gulshan’s life is already a mess. He has lost his job and separated from his wife and is living with Preeto, played by Tewari with the right touch of affection and exasperation. He’s an insensitive, rude man who in the beginning refers to his players as pagals (mad), arguing, “What is the meaning of this — that you can’t call mad people mad?”

Gulshan is the exact opposite of Ram Shankar Nikumbh, the compassionate, caring teacher that Khan played in 2007’s Taare Zameen Par in 2007; if Gulshan and Nimbukh met, they would barely be able to make conversation. But slowly, Gulshan changes — as one of the players says, “We are coaching him.” By the end of the film, he comes to understand that he was never the teacher, and that the people he had considered inferior were in fact always ahead of him. Like Rocky Randhawa in Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (Rocky and Rani’s Love Story), Gulshan comes to understand that the things we learned in childhood or imbibed from our environment aren’t necessarily right.

Prasanna, whose last film, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (Let the Marriage Be Fruitful), was about erectile dysfunction, has a talent for adding lightness and wit to complicated situations. There is an inherent generosity in his worldview, which is inclusive and positive and humane. Soaked in sweetness and life lessons, Sitaare Zameen Par is insistent on making us into better people by asking us to reconsider our definitions of normality and success. Winning in life, it reminds us, is about so much more than a competition.

But the moral high ground can get exhausting. One character, played by Kartar Paaji, has a role that is mostly explaining, expounding and underlining the central message. Ram Sampath’s background score does even more of this emphasizing. It’s almost as if Prasanna didn’t trust that we would get the messaging, so he keeps hammering it in again and again for over two and a half hours.

Keeping with that tonality, Khan pitches his performances a few notches higher than his counterpart Javier Gutiérrez’s in the Spanish original. Though his arched eyebrows, perpetual frown and exasperated hand gestures are a little more obvious, he makes it work. Genelia Deshmukh’s Sunita, Gulshan’s wife, isn’t well fleshed out, but she gets one scene in which she shines. And Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s effervescent title track adds buoyancy to the narrative.

Be warned that Sitaare Zameen Par isn’t a patch on Taare Zameen Par. That film shattered your soul with finesse and delicacy and then, magically, enabled you to heal again. This one, though a spiritual sequel, doesn’t possess the same artistry; it’s too on-the-nose and front-loaded with sentimentality. But it will put a smile on your face — and perhaps even nudge you to suspend judgment the next time you encounter someone who doesn’t fit your definition of normal.