Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Amar Singh Chamkila’ on Netflix, A Biopic About the Controversial Punjabi Singer

The latest Netflix India film seems to be a perfect fit for its star Diljit Dosanjh, the Punjabi actor and singer who is having a bit of a crossover moment after playing Coachella in 2023 and recently collaborating with Saweetie on a single called “Khutti.” In Amar Singh Chamkila, Dosanjh plays Chamkila for the second time (he portrayed the singer just last year in the Punjabi-language film Jodi). Will this second biopic about a low-caste Sikh singer-turned-superstar give Dosanjh another hit?

AMAR SINGH CHAMKILA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1988, as singer Amar Singh Chamkila arrives at a gig, he and his singing-partner-turned-wife Amarjot are gunned down in cold blood. After his assassination, his old friend and first collaborator retells Chamkila’s life story in a series of flashbacks that detail his rise from a low-class factory worker to an Indian music legend. The film utilizes Chamkila’s songs throughout, highlighting his knack for catchy, if sophomoric, lyrics as well as real images of Chamkila and Amarjot, underscoring the true-to-life story helmed by director Imtiaz Ali.

What Will It Remind You Of?: Amar Singh Chamkila plays like a typical biopic, with much of the story playing out in flashback. There are many recreated performance scenes based on real footage of the central couple, which evokes musical biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody. However, its insistence on portraying its main character through rose-colored glasses puts it in the same camp as Bob Marley’s feature One Love.

Performance Worth Watching: Dosanjh, who has had a career both on the screen and on the stage, is entirely at home here. The singer imbues Chamkila with humility and cheekiness, giving audiences a sense of who the real man was — clearly a figure of fascination for Dosanjh.

Memorable Dialogue: “Not everyone can afford to think about right and wrong. People like me have to survive somehow…I have to cater to my audience,” Chamkila tells his booker and financial handler mid-way through the movie as his career is starting to take off. It serves as a reminder of his grassroots rise and controversial themes in his music.

Sex and Skin: The most sexually explicit thing in the movie are Chamkila’s lyrics.

Our Take: One of the first lines in the real Amar Singh Chamkila’s Wikipedia page details his naughty, inflammatory lyrics: “His themes majorly consisted of women objectification, alcoholism, sexual violence, and domestic violence.” (The notion is repeated in retellings of his story, including this piece on Republic World). I was nervous that a Bollywood-coded and Indian-produced film would blunt the real man’s thorns, but refreshingly the song playing over the film’s titles blatantly details his controversial personality. “Everyone listens to Chamkila’s lyrics, whether they admit it or not,” the townspeople sing directly to the camera in the first of many musical numbers.

However, that’s where the movie stops in really interrogating his lyrics; the eponymous film makes a few nods at his objectifying lyrics, but explains them away with the endorsement of village women who sing along behind closed doors. This is fine when it’s simply about sex, as it’s refreshing to see Indians reclaiming sexual desires, but the film consciously doesn’t touch themes of sexual violence. The film similarly skates over his controversial second marriage, only briefly showing the resistance in the community as he effectively left his first wife and first two children for his singing partner, in order to make their partnership palatable for conservative minds.

Told through flashes between past and present, the jumps between time are a bit disorienting, and the cuts to the post-assassination timeline disrupts the momentum of Dosanjh’s Chamkila. Occasional bouts of hand-drawn scenes also indicate moments in Chamkila’s history that the filmmakers have deemed not camera-friendly (like when his fans break through a roof during one of his concerts), but they’re used somewhat randomly, which feels unnatural to the rhythms of the film.

The bright spots of the film are Dosanjh’s layered performance and the music, which is both composed by the great A.R. Rahman and lifted from Chamkila’s library, and sung by Dosanjh and his co-star Parineeti Chopra. The format, which adheres more closely to American musicals in which the musical number moves the story forward instead of functioning as a dream sequence, helps educate audiences on Chamkila’s persona and his prowess.

But outside of that, the film doesn’t dazzle over it’s 2.5 hour runtime and is bogged down by a tired structure and sanitized re-telling. With his murder as the central framing device, the film doesn’t have a clear POV on the motivations behind Chamkila’s assassination — it’s important to note that there are still mysteries surrounding the events of that day, but the film chooses to play everything down the middle. For a film centered on such a colorful character, it’s a shame the end result is boring.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Diljit Dosanjh film is a down-the-middle biopic, the opposite of what a character like Chamkila demands.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, Teen Vogue, ELLE.com, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.