Namrata Rao’s sentimental docuseries on Hindi cinema’s iconic writer duo works best as a preservation of Salim Khan-Javed Akhtar’s partnership without saying much of the way they partnered through it all
Every time a documentary in India is backed by a streaming platform, the shortcomings write themselves. The reasons are self-explanatory. On the one hand, a section of audacious non-fiction filmmakers are scrambling to find distribution (most festival-acclaimed documentaries are nowhere to be seen back home) and on the other end, streamers are accommodating template-driven, populist work which provoke little to no discussion.
The themes are set in stone. Either there are sordid true crimes (Indian Predator, The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth) or reality shows dressed as non-fiction (Indian Matchmaking, Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives). There is another kind, ambiguous in their desire for access at the cost of criticality. Smriti Mundhra’s The Romantics (2023) on the rise and rise of the production house Yash Raj is an example and so is Modern Masters: SS Rajamouli (2024), a fawning portrait of a complicated filmmaker. Namrata Rao’s Angry Young Men feels the same on paper.
Rao, who has had an instructive career as an editor, makes her directorial debut with Angry Young Men, a three-episode docuseries on the famous writing duo Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar. Their children are the producers (Salman Khan Films, Excel Media & Entertainment and Tiger Baby), a detail which is telling in the creative control the subjects can exercise.
Blockbusters, they wrote
In many ways, Angry Young Men hews close. The series unfolds as a resounding reiteration of their collective genius while being designed as an origin story of two outsiders. Amitabh Bachchan, their collaborator in many films, makes an appearance, so do actors like Aamir Khan and Hrithik Roshan who retell the lasting impressions their work had on them. Roshan shares that he related to the quiet heroism of the angry young man, a male archetype Khan and Akhtar had cultivated in their writing as a reaction to the 1970s’ political turmoil in India.
But it is not just actors. Rao assembles a wide-ranging set of people, comprising writers, family members, film scholars and theatre owners, who, along with archival footage and pictures, stitch together the legacy of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar. The many talking heads would have been chaotic if the proceedings were not headlined by the two pivotal men who are as charming as they come.
Khan and Akhtar spend most of the runtime looking back at their partnership and individual journeys. Both came to Mumbai to jump start their careers, both found each other after years of struggling (Khan was a small-time actor and Akhtar wrote dialogues) and both collaborated to craft a creative partnership that spawned consecutive hits (they wrote 24 films together, 22 were superhits) and altered the screenplay grammar in mainstream Hindi cinema.
Split wide open
Anecdotes bounce off the walls when they are on screen. Like Dev Anand refusing Zanjeer (1973), a film that changed careers of everyone involved, because there were no songs, Salim and Javed hiring a painter to imprint their names across film posters as acknowledging writers was not a common practice, or both taking out a full-blown advertisement, anticipating the success of Sholay (1975), days after it released to a lukewarm response. Angry Young Men gains much from the people it chooses to showcase. It also doesn’t tilt to hagiography.
If Rao chooses to assemble their legacy, she also goes the extra mile to assess it. Amidst the echo of praise, screenwriter Anjum Rajabali chimes in about the insignificance of the women in their films. They all had careers, he notes, but it vanished the moment they met the male lead. It is a small instance but it pries the door open, ever so lightly, to look at the work done by the writers beyond the male prototypes.
Jaya Bachchan calls them brats and Honey Irani, screenwriter and Akhtar’s first wife, shares that their fall was impending because success got into their heads. The documentary skirts around their famous split but refuses to look away when Akhtar and Khan admit that they flew too high (in one scene Karan Johar says they charged more than Amitabh Bachchan for writing Dostana) and that “Salim-Javed did not realise the value of goodwill.” The calls dried up soon and people celebrated their failure.
Astute gaze, dissonant tone
In these moments Angry Young Men ceases to become about two personalities and becomes about two old people who have finally halted to look back. It helps that Rao has helmed the project. Editors are unacknowledged storytellers and she designs the narrative in a way where the process of their writing remains mysterious but the roots are revealed. This is achieved when a scene from Sholay where Gabbar Singh, the legendary villain, says the famous, “Kitne aadmi the?” and it is cut to the faces of both Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan.
It soon becomes clear that they were projecting their own anger on the protagonists, that the nagging mother issue in their films stemmed from the fact that both lost their mothers young (filmmaker Sangeeta Datta states it their male heroes’ obsession with the mother was Oedipal in nature). Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar were, as the kids call it, the OG angry young men whose lives unravelled in a similar fashion even after the collaboration severed. Both talk about marriages and in a moving instance, Akhtar says, Honey Irani is the only person he feels guilty towards.
Having said that, not everything falls into place. The last episode, entirely dedicated to writers, is insightful but there is a tonal dissonance from the entire series. The gaze is astute but there is still a lot of reverence. In that way, Angry Young Men feels closer to Made in England (2024), the sentimental ode to filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, than to The Romantics, an engaging PR exercise. It works best as a preservation of Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan’s partnership without saying much of the way they partnered through it all.
Angry Young Men is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video
