Sometimes you wait ages for a shot at playing an obsessive musician with emotional baggage who gets brought low by an unforeseen medical drama, and then two movies come along at once. British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed (Rogue One, Nightcrawler) staggered as a drug-addicted thrash rock drummer losing his hearing in Sound of Metal (which is sadly yet to score an Australian distributor); now he’s at it again in Mogul Mowgli.
Co-written with director Bassam Tariq, Ahmed (one half of ingeniously named hip-hop outfit the Swet Shop Boys) borrows from the heavy breathing, slam-poetry style of his solo album The Long Goodbye to depict Zed. Zed's about to break the big time in New York and his girlfriend (Aiysha Hart) is less than impressed with his constant absence and suggests he takes a time out to reconnect with family in London. And pretty much a permanent time out from her too.
Family dramas aplenty await him in London, along with a strong sense from his relos that he’s gotten too big for his boots and lost sight of his roots. And then a shock medical crisis involving an autoimmune disease crashes in out of the blue and upends everything. Falling from fame and feeling like an outsider (slurred with the insult ‘coconut’, or brown on the outside, white within), he begs his manager (Anjana Vasan) to keep the tour deal on the table, even as younger rival RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan) is nipping at his toes.
Ahmed mesmerises in this powerful drama about dislocation from what truly matters. The character's strife with his dad would be more formulaic were it not for a great performance by a silver-haired Alyy Khan, and there’s a nightmarish magical realist twist that sees Zed haunted by visitations from a Sikh religious figure inextricably tied to his music. Ahmed delivers an astounding turn in Zed's hardest moment, as he struggles to maintain dignity all alone in a hospital toilet cubicle. It’s real good shit.