Rock on - review

Director: Abhishek Kapoor
Cast: Farhan Akhtar, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kohli, Luke Kenny, Prachi Desai, Shahana Goswami
Rating: ****

Movies which make you nostalgic and connect you with your past have always been appreciated by the audience. While some movies go overboard with the campus musings, some are packaged so well that people simply fall in love with the movie.
The debutant director's Rock-on is one such movie where people can go back in memory lane and relate with their campus lives.

For director tuned actor Farhan Akhtar, this is a perfect launching pad for an acting career and he dosent dissapoint you one bit with his performance.

There has been many movies with a group of four to five friends having a re-union after many years. What engages rock-on is the common passion these 4 friends share for music and their band Magik which failed to take off.

Aditya Shroff (Farhan) works for a leading MNC, killer drummer (Purab Kohli) takes over his dad's jewellery business. Rob (Luke Kenny) the keyboard player works with Anu Malik on jingles and the lead guitarist Joe (Arjun Rampal) plays guitar in parties and teaches kids part time. His nagging wife Debey (Shahana Goswami) looks after the family fish business.

Aditya Shroff's wife Shakshi (Prachi desai) finds their relationship lacking love and clueless about her husband's un-emphatic behaviour. Farhan Akthar essays the role well as a lost soul going about his mechanical work style. Aditya's wife encounters KD in his showroom and discovers her husband's past life and about his stint with a rock band. She also discovers the photos and video of his friends in their closet. All of them have funny moustaches, beard and hair as rock stars. Shakshi tries to arrange a re-union with his friends hoping to give his life back.

The rest of the movie unfolds on what happened in the past that leads to their break-up and Why Aditya isolates himself from his friends. However its not very clear why he had to break-up with his girl friend for no fault of hers.
The movie goes back and forth on the lead charaters, their rock band magik, their failure and their joy. They eventually re-unite and decide to give their last shot for their band but there are different priorities in their lives now which makes it difficult.

Joe and Debbie's characters struggling to live a decent life with their income is etched very well. Debbie is impressive as a frustrated wife hating their fish business far from being a stylist she once wanted to be. She wants Joe to take up a lucrative career than to re-join a band that failed 10 years back because of their differences.

Some of the scenes about the brain tumour could have been avoided. It has been repeated in far too many movies about one friend dying among the four. The last scene about the future was interesting.

Most of the songs (6 sung by Farhan Akhtar) are good and well picturised which creates the tempo throughout the film. Dialogues and performances from the lead artistes make it a very engaging movie.

Indian movies are getting better by the day and there is a clear market segmentation. There is new genre of multiplex movies which dare to experiment with the scripts. Rock on is definitely different from the run of the mill movies and can make a perfect weekend !