Sitaare Zameen Par Movie Review & Rating: An insensitive, full-of-himself basketball coach, suspended from his job, finds himself doing community service: in three months he has to shape a group of young adults, largely with Down Syndrome, into a team that is capable of participating in tournaments. Based on the 2018 Spanish film Campeones, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ adopts the original’s determinedly cheery vein to win its matches; in the process, it also wins our hearts.

Gulshan (Aamir Khan) is the guy with an attitude problem, and he uses it to make everyone around him unhappy. His wife Sunita (Genelia d’Souza) wants a baby. He doesn’t. His senior coach wants compliance. Gulshan behaves badly. A drunk driving incident leads him, reluctance and truculence firmly in place, to a vocational centre for people with special needs. Where he encounters a group of spirited youngsters who challenge his idea of ‘yeh bechaare bachche’: Satbir, Guddu, Bantu, Hargovind, Sharmaji, Lotus, Raju, Kareem, Sunil, Golu are all young people with specific personality quirks which go beyond their facial Downs distinctiveness, often unclear vocalisation and other limitations which are part of the autism spectrum. These are young people who have a sense of self, and fun, and slowly but surely, Gulshan finds himself being drawn into their circle, and what started as a punishment becomes pure affection.

This film wouldn’t have worked as well as it does if Aamir hadn’t been fully committed to putting himself out there as a hero-who-is-a-jerk, letting us walk past the annoyingly noble Lal Singh Chadha character which never hit any of its marks. One of Aamir’s strengths is to play a regular, flawed guy who learns the error of his ways –yes, ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ is also part of this pantheon– and Gulshan is a welcome addition.

How the insufferable Gulshan finds a better side of himself, replacing the smirk with a smile, is a big part of ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’: you can call that out for what it is, but you can also see how a star can power a story like this, in the way it platforms and makes visible those who live with disability. It teeters very close to becoming an Aamir Khan vehicle– look, look, I am not irredeemable, even if I start out by calling these adults ‘paagal’ and ‘mental’, so of a piece with of how society at large views ‘differentness’ –but it manages to strike a balance by letting it be a film about the neurodivergent young people who may not lead the narrative but have an equal share in it.

To make a film revolving around intellectual disability is fraught with risk. If you make people cry, people within the community can accuse the filmmakers of being miserabilist ; if you make them laugh, you can be charged with making light of a tough situation. Borrowing the tone from the original, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ chooses to stay on the side of laughter, and it’s a wise decision, because what you can convey to the average person through laughs sometimes has more weight than wrung-out-tears. The last time I watched an effective film showcasing a character with Downs was Nikhil Pherwani’s ‘Ahaan’ which should have been watched by more people; ‘Sitaare’ has the starry heft to go out far and wide, and I’m happy that it’s more feel-good than feel-bad.