Sanju

The story

"Sanju" dramatises the turbulent life of Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt, tracing the crashes and comebacks of a man who was, by turns, a heart-throb, a drug addict, a grieving son and a convict. The film is built around a clever framing device: after rejecting a fawning, Gandhi-comparing manuscript, Dutt (Ranbir Kapoor) hunts down a hard-nosed journalist, Winnie Dias (Anushka Sharma), and asks her to write an honest account of his life.

From there the narrative moves through flashbacks — his 1980s spiral into heroin addiction, his fierce but tender bond with his actor-politician father Sunil Dutt (Paresh Rawal) and his dying mother Nargis (Manisha Koirala), and his arrest under the Arms Act for possessing weapons connected to the 1993 Bombay bombings. Running roughly 161 minutes, it folds director Rajkumar Hirani's trademark warmth and comedy into a redemption arc, with the loyal friendship between Sanju and his buddy Kamlesh (Vicky Kaushal) as its emotional spine.

Making of the film

The project carried a neat irony: Hirani had earlier directed Sanjay Dutt in the beloved "Munna Bhai" comedies, so "Sanju" was, in effect, a filmmaker telling the real story of his own former star. Hirani co-wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator Abhijat Joshi, drawing on extensive conversations with Dutt, and produced the film with Vidhu Vinod Chopra under the Rajkumar Hirani Films and Vinod Chopra Films banners.

At the film's centre is one of Hindi cinema's most discussed physical transformations. Ranbir Kapoor played Dutt across several decades and distinct "looks," reportedly spending around six weeks preparing each one and sitting up to six hours a day in prosthetic make-up. To build the muscular, wrestler-like frame of Dutt's "Khalnayak" era, he is said to have eaten as many as eight meals a day and woken at 3 a.m. for protein shakes — then shed the bulk again for gaunter phases of the story.

Music

The soundtrack was composed chiefly by the duo Rohan-Rohan and by Vikram Montrose, with A. R. Rahman coming aboard as a guest composer. Rahman's contribution, the rousing "Kar Har Maidaan Fateh" sung by Sukhwinder Singh and Shreya Ghoshal, became the film's motivational anthem and a widely used pump-up track well beyond the movie itself.

Elsewhere the album leaned playful and eclectic — the cheeky "Main Badhiya Tu Bhi Badhiya," featuring Sonu Nigam, and the flirtatious "Ruby Ruby" sung by Sunidhi Chauhan (tied to Sonam Kapoor's character) — matching the film's shifts between broad comedy and heavy drama.

Performances

Even critics who were cool on the film's politics were near-unanimous about Ranbir Kapoor. His mimicry of Dutt's gait, drawl and physical bearing across ages was hailed as a tour-de-force, and it won him the Filmfare Award for Best Actor. It remains one of the defining showcases of his range.

The film was also a launchpad for Vicky Kaushal, whose warm turn as the steadfast friend Kamlesh won the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor and helped make 2018 his breakout year. Paresh Rawal drew praise as the dignified, long-suffering Sunil Dutt, and Manisha Koirala left a mark in her brief, moving stretch as Nargis.

Box office and legacy

"Sanju" was released worldwide on 29 June 2018 and became a commercial juggernaut. It was the biggest opener of the year in Hindi cinema — around ₹34.75 crore on day one — and its day-three haul (reported at about ₹46.71 crore) was then the highest single-day gross ever for a Hindi film. Made on a budget of roughly ₹96 crore, it went on to earn well over ₹500 crore worldwide, ending 2018 as the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year.

Its legacy is genuinely double-edged. On one hand it confirmed Hirani's mass appeal and Ranbir Kapoor's stature as a performer; on the other, it drew sustained criticism for being too sympathetic to its subject — accused by some commentators of casting Dutt as a victim of a sensationalist media while soft-pedalling the gravest questions around the 1993 blasts. That tension — between a hugely entertaining, big-hearted crowd-pleaser and a contested piece of image rehabilitation — is a large part of why the film is still argued about.

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