Bromance, Cricket and Sectarian Riots

Abhishek Kapoor’s “Kai Po Che” takes risks, not least in its choice of subject matter. Set in Ahmedabad, this tale of three friends making their way in the new India builds up to an ugly moment in recent history: the 2002 riots in Gujarat State in which Hindu mobs attacked Muslims, killing nearly 1,000.

Ambitious but uneven, “Kai Po Che” (based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life”) mixes, not quite successfully, traditional Bollywood storytelling with something less conventional. Perhaps that’s because it was adapted from a contemporary novel, which remains rare in commercial Hindi cinema. Also unusually, the movie doesn’t use star power to hammer home a message.

The three friends are a typically mismatched collection. Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is the handsome one, volatile and a gifted cricket player. Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav) is the nerdy numbers guy. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is ... well, what is he Not much more than a narrative necessity, a Hindu from a religious family whose uncle, ominously, is a high muck-a-muck in a nationalist political party.

With its locations in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, and its careful references to time â€" the date is often flashed on screen, which for South Asian viewers, at least, is a clear marker of what’s to come â€" the movie sets up expectations of a certain kind of realism that it delivers only fitfully.

Mr. Kapoor too often gives the brothers-for-life theme the Bollywood treatment, including a bromantic song montage full of elegiac bonding: We’re young! We’re crazy! We jump off parapets into the green, green sea! That might work in another film, but here it takes up space, going sentimental when the story needs to go deep. Less generic is the plotline involving Ishaan’s discovery of a Muslim boy, Ali (Digvijay Deshmukh), cricket’s version of the Natural, and their complicated teacher-student relationship.

Omi is too bland for his (spoiler, I suppose) metamorphosis into a glassy-eyed, scimitar-wielding Hindu marauder to resonate. But the Ishaan-Ali story grows more interesting as the threat of violence increases, and then turns to bloodshed. (Here too the movie mixes a realistic impulse with a mythic, only-in-the-movies showdown.) And though a sudsy epilogue rings false, there’s a measure of optimism in the story’s insistence that communal barriers can be transcended, however briefly or imperfectly, through the national pastime, cricket.