The trade analyst's praise lands as Rajkummar Rao builds a run of real-life portrayals, from Srikanth Bolla to an upcoming turn as Sourav Ganguly in Dada.
Taran Adarsh has a strong opinion on Prahaar, and it centres entirely on its lead actor. The trade analyst and critic says Rajkummar Rao's version of public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam doesn't feel like a performance at all.
"Rajkummar Rao is undoubtedly one of the finest actors we have today, and with Prahaar, he once again reminds us why," Adarsh said. "His portrayal of Ujjwal Nikam is remarkable. From his body language and dialogue delivery to the intensity he brings to the courtroom sequences, Rajkummar gets the nuances right. What stands out is that you don't see Rajkummar Rao playing Ujjwal Nikam, you see Ujjwal Nikam on screen. It's a terrific performance and another reminder of the range and calibre of this actor."
That's about as direct a compliment as a trade voice can hand an actor. Adarsh zeroes in on the specifics, the courtroom scenes in particular, where Rao is said to hold a controlled intensity rather than lean into theatrics. Mannerisms, posture, the rhythm of speech, all of it apparently tracks close to the real Nikam rather than a broad impression of him.
This isn't new territory for Rao. He's quietly built a parallel career playing actual people, each one from a completely different world. There was Srikanth Bolla, the industrialist he played in Srikanth, a film that went on to win the National Film Award for Best Hindi Feature. Now there's Nikam, the prosecutor at the centre of some of India's most watched criminal trials. And next up, reportedly, is Sourav Ganguly, with Rao set to play the former India cricket captain in the biopic Dada.
It's an odd little resume when you line it up, an industrialist, a lawyer, a cricketer, none of them obviously connected except that they're all real men whose public selves Rao has to reconstruct from scratch each time. Prahaar seems to be the latest proof that he's good at the reconstruction part, the bit where an actor has to vanish behind a person everyone already has an image of in their head.
Whether the rest of Prahaar holds up around that performance is a separate question, one the box office and wider reviews will answer in the coming days. But the Nikam casting, on this telling, isn't the film's gamble. It's the film's strongest card.
For Rao, the bigger shift comes after. Dada will ask him to do this all over again, this time stepping into cricket whites and a captain's persona that an entire country has watched for decades. If Prahaar is any indication, he's not short on the discipline that job demands.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.