A major portion of the new Malayalam film Moonwalk, directed by Vinod AK, focuses on building the aura around the introduction of breakdance into pop culture. The movie is set in the late 80’s, and the characters in the film are in that transition phase from disco to breakdance. Co-written by the director, the script of Moonwalk aspires to be political, and it also wants to document the cultural setting of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Even though most parts of the movie are invested in generic world-building, the climax that incorporates all the bits and pieces we saw to complete a particular character arc makes the film enjoyable in totality.
The movie is set against the backdrop of Trivandrum in the late ’80s. A gang of 6 or 7 boys, who were in college doing their pre-degree and degree at that time, decided to form a dance group when they saw another well-experienced group performing breakdance superbly on stage. What we see is the efforts of this gang to nurture their dancing dream while living in a conventional orthodox society that rarely encouraged them.
Moonwalk doesn’t really have your conventional structure of premise, conflict, and resolution. Vinod AK wants to show the political reality of that period. We see how these boys are treated within families, and we see how law and order look at these people with an eye of judgment (something that is prevalent even now). Within its runtime of one hour and 58 minutes, the writing focuses on giving us a better idea of the backdrops of each character. The placement of the dance performances is ultimately bullet points in the journey of these characters. There is no proper closure for most of the characters, and hence, I feel it was somewhat difficult to connect with those characters. The only character with whom we might feel a connection is Sura, played by Sibi Kuttappan.
The unevenness we feel in the movie is largely due to the absence or lack of significance of dance in the earlier portions. It is primarily a friendship story of people from a wide variety of backdrops. But the dance track is taking the back seat for most of the journey, and to be frank, it depends on nostalgia rather than giving us that wow element by showing a brilliant dance number. I am someone who grew up in the ’90s, and I can relate to the excitement around getting to see a breakdance number in the pre-mobile phone era. In a way, the lack of amazement in the dance numbers is a clever strategy, as one key performance towards the end gets the much-needed applause and focus because of the usualness of the rest. The music by Prashanth Pillai has that retro charm. The cinematography opts for that earthy texture. I felt the cuts were a bit too excessive in some of the dance performances. The quality of the dance performance is something we are looking forward to seeing. Seeing too many cuts in the dance performance somewhere reduces the wow factor we anticipate in that performance.
Except for Siddharth Babu, almost all of the actors who performed the part of the main leads in the film are new, and that freshness really helps the movie establish good chemistry on screen. While almost everyone did a really good job, the two performances that stayed with me came from Anunath and Sibi Kuttappan. Anunath can be considered the hero of the movie because the screenplay gives more emphasis on his family dynamics, his passion, and his love life. And he was able to pull off all those portions neatly on screen. Sibi Kuttappan is underplaying the character without really going away from the radar. Be it the way he sticks on with the whole gang despite facing various kinds of discrimination or the way he performs the final dance with passion, the earnestness with which he performed the character really elevated the movie in the final bits.
Structurally, Moonwalk is a conventional underdog story that is not exciting you with fresh storytelling. However, the time it has invested in shaping its characters is not entirely wasted, and because we know the journey of some of the crucial characters, the movie gets that slight push from the middling zone towards the end. With political commentary and a lot of nostalgia, including breakdance and Michael Jackson, Moonwalk ultimately is a passable movie with occasional sparks.
