Celeb-studded ‘Angry Young Men’ needs a sub-genre of its own

In the first episode of Angry Young Men: The Salim-Javed Story, there’s a moment when Javed Akhtar’s voice catches. The poet, lyricist, and screenwriter is talking about how the sight of an opulent room and lavish breakfast in a five-star hotel reminds him of being a sleep-deprived, starving young man who jostled for space in a third-class compartment in a train to Mumbai, the city where he was determined make it in the Hindi film industry. “Abhi bhi mujhe lagta hai yeh breakfast mera nahin hai. Yeh kisi aur ka hai jo mujhe mil raha hai” (Even now, I feel this breakfast isn’t really mine. It was meant for someone else and I’m getting it instead). 

Yes, even Javed Akhtar—a bona fide Bollywood icon who, in the series, Jaya Bachchan describes as a brat; whose bold self-assuredness is the stuff of stories that, even today, are traded among generations of screenwriters; who was so convinced he would be a success that he told himself, while walking from Dadar to Bandra (because he couldn’t afford the bus fare), that these years of struggle would make a great chapter in his autobiography—falls prey to impostor syndrome. 

Moments of rare vulnerability are scattered through the three-part docu series

Scattered through Angry Young Men are moments like this, which reveal more vulnerable aspects of Akhtar and his former writing partner, Salim Khan. The three-part docu-series on Prime Video is mostly an unabashed celebration of the duo who gave the Hindi film industry some of its most beloved films, including Sholay, Deewaar, Zanjeer, Trishul, Yaadon Ki Baaraat, and Seeta Aur Geeta. And in an industry that mostly focuses on who’s in front of the camera, they were also arguably the first screenwriters to become celebrities in their own right (not surprising, given how hard they fought for prominent credit and adequate pay for writers). Between when they teamed up in the early 1970s to their infamous split in ’80s, they worked on 24 films, of which 22 were monster hits, an enviable track record by any standards, and well worth a docu-style deep dive. But this show is not that.

As with any documentary, central to Angry Young Men’s success is the access that director Namrata Rao gets to her subjects and their families, as well as their colleagues. As an award-winning editor whose credits include Kahaani, Band Baaja Baaraat, and Ishqiya, Rao is someone for whom doors should open, but there’s another, more important detail. The show is produced by Salman Khan Films, Farhan Akhtar’s Excel Media & Entertainment, and Zoya Akhtar’s Tiger Baby Films. Which is to say, the list of executive producers includes most of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar’s children, and while all this guarantees Rao unprecedented access to the subjects and their close circles, it goes hand-in-hand with their control over the narrative. We see exactly and only what the Khan and Akhtar families would like us to see.

Traditionally, a documentary is like a visual arm of journalism, emphasising the perspective of a director whose distance from the subject makes them more alert to a story’s nuances and complexities. But lately, the lines have blurred. While there have been some outstanding examples of personal storytelling in documentaries such as My Architect (a movie on the life of architect Louis Kahn by his son Nathaniel Kahn)—the credit for creating a visual record that’s intimate while also being a mouthpiece for its subject has to go to the music business. From K-pop superstars BTS’ docu-series Burn the Stage to Miss Americana’s portrait of Taylor Swift to Beyoncé’s Homecoming, the music industry has created a whole new sub-genre of documentary filmmaking in which the subject, rather than the director, effectively decides how they’re presented. And Angry Young Men fits in here. 

In India, one of the first examples of the access-driven documentary in recent times was Netflix’s The Romantics, a 2023 series that celebrated director Yash Chopra and the production house he founded. Chopra’s younger son, Uday, is listed as one of the producers. The trump card was an interview with the older son, the famously reclusive chairperson of Yash Raj Films, Aditya Chopra, who has made some of the biggest blockbusters in Hindi cinema’s history. It’s difficult to imagine he’d have agreed to an interview if it hadn’t been a home production and if the series wasn’t effectively a promotional corporate film made glossy. But despite that, the show had its moments of charm and magic. Because balancing out Aditya Chopra’s carefully scripted answers and the aggrandising of Uday Chopra were wonderful stories behind the making of Yash Chopra’s films. These insights and anecdotes redeemed The Romantics because we have so little by way of archives in India, especially for popular culture.

It is this preservation of memories, film history, and the history of India (remember that Salim-Javed were at their screenwriting peak in the 1970s, and the political sentiments of the era had an inarguable impact on their movies—the very trope of ‘Angry Young Man’ a case in point) that makes Angry Young Men such a welcome addition to our streaming list, despite the carefully curated intimacy it provides.

Rao's sensitive direction captures stunning moments of vulnerability and warmth

What also makes the series a delight is Rao’s intelligent, sensitive direction. Her storytelling eye goes beyond what is said with clever detailing and her attention to her subjects’ body language. There’s a wonderful shot of Salim Khan’s fingers fiddling with a button on the cuff of his shirt while he says there is nothing in his past that he regrets. In another shot, Javed Akhtar is seated alone in a room with fading light, a little spent from reminiscing about the years, and he murmurs, “Narm ho gayi roshni” (The light is softer now). Rao also makes ample use of her access to the film industry outside of the Akhtar and Khan families. From Shyam Benegal to Karan Johar to Aamir Khan, the stars come out to raise a toast to Salim-Javed. But more than the celebrity quotient or even the delightful anecdotes describing how the pair forced the film industry to acknowledge the importance of writers, it’s these quiet, unguarded moments of melancholia that make this series memorable.

By the end of Angry Young Men, we still may not know exactly why Salim-Javed split up or how they truly feel about their once-intimate relationship becoming distant. But we do have a treasure trove of their memories. To see Khan’s outrage at a lyricist getting more love for “writing a single page” than screenwriters do for their whole script, or his admission of being “inspired by” Hollywood films and Akhtar’s honest explanation of how the attitude to plagiarism has changed in commercial Indian cinema, there's a lot in this series that feels authentic, even if it is too meticulously staged to feel candid. Airbrushed with adoration as they may be, at least fragments of the lives of Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan, like the movies they wrote, have now been preserved in film.

Angry Young Men: The Salim-Javed Story is streaming on Prime Video