Yo Yo Honey Singh – Famous movie review: Honey Singh spits venom, bares his soul in faintly damning Netflix documentary

Also read – AP Dhillon First of a Kind review: Prime Video series about Punjabi music phenom is all swag, little substance

Honey Singh in Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous.

Directed by Mozez Singh, whose voice is heard on several occasions during the film, Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous at least resembles a documentary. It isn’t merely a collection of talking heads gushing about whoever the subject happens to be. There is some of that here, too. Guru Randhawa saunters into frame, rubbing his hands and narrating a nostalgic story about fandom. But the film balances it out with enough reality checks. For instance, a music journalist shows up and describes Honey as a has-been without batting so much as an eyelid. Mozez Singh, for his part, at least touches upon thorny subjects such as Honey’s drug addiction, the rumours that he was whacked by Shah Rukh Khan, and the domestic violence accusations that his ex-wife Shalini had slapped him with some years ago. Honey has, however, been more honest about his past missteps in media interviews, the most telling of which was longer than this film.

For instance, he doesn’t own up to his negligent behaviour towards his ex-wife at any moment in the documentary’s lean 80-minute run-time. Nor does he go into too much detail about his drug abuse. The documentary’s sole objective, it seems, is to highlight the mental health issues that have plagued Honey for most of his adult life. Some scenes are surprisingly unfiltered, such as the one in which he explains the medication he’s on. His mother makes little ‘pudiyas’ for him daily, he says, momentarily shedding his brash exterior and turning into a small child. She also insists that he eats his meals on time, and in one scene, entices him with some momos. He seems distant, disengaged, disinterested. These are the emotions that he was going through during the half-decade when he seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.

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Sardaar Sarabjit Singh, Sneha Singh, Bhupinder Kaur in Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous.

In another contemplative scene, Honey gazes at a cremation ground in his childhood neighbourhood – it’s as morbid as it sounds – and says that he wishes to be cremated there when his time comes. He alludes to the cyclical nature of life several occasions. “What goes around comes around, I really believe that,” he says. But there is a sense that the film’s subject is deeper than the film itself. Every idea that it addresses, it does so at an arm’s length. There are moments where it seems like Honey is rearing to be let loose, but he’s held back by the filmmaker’s lack of curiosity. Perhaps a less sanitised cut of the film exists on the Netflix cloud somewhere. The knee-jerk reaction would be to wonder why they didn’t turn this into a series, but it’s not that the AP Dhillon documentary series on Prime Video was more insightful just because it was four times as long. In a sobering moment for the rapper, a female extra on one of his recent music video shoots confuses him for Dhillon. He seems to be offended.

The film’s best scenes are the ones in which you’re made a fly-on-the-wall, observing the unconditional love that Honey’s family still has for him, witnessing the look on his face when he’s tasked to improve a particularly terrible Bollywood song, and watching him bare his soul before the world. “I went to hell and back,” he says, describing the symptoms of his bipolar disorder in tremendous, often upsetting detail. But Honey still doesn’t have the level of self-awareness where he’s able to address his obvious narcissism, and sadly, neither does the film.

Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous
Director: Mozez Singh
Rating: 3/5