Vin Diesel’s vapid xXx made some noises about killing off a hoary, operatic film formula, but Dev.D’s actually gone and done it. This movie’s theme song is an existential howl of Hindi speed metal, and if the punkishness is a little poseur, it’s still mostly real. The fake, syrupy morality of mainstream Bollywood is nowhere in this film. A modern Devdas would of course be popping pills and riding rails, and everyone below a certain age knows where to find Delhi’s underground speakeasies. Most of the Punjabi in the movie isn’t Hindified, and none of the leads are model-pretty.

Dev.D resolutely refuses to romanticize its namesake. This Dev is a privileged asshole who leaves emotional wounds on his Paro/Parminder and runs over pavement dwellers in the BMW his daddy bought. Chandramukhi is an Indian and French Canadian diplomat’s daughter who entered the oldest profession after a cell phone video scandal and pays for school via phone sex in Tamil. The English subtitles are consistently dirtier than the Hindi. In one of the movie’s wittiest touches, its Chunni, the best friend and sidekick, is a pink VW Rabbit-driving pimp kitted out in clashy colors that would make Liberace blush.

Like Fanaa (Destroyed), Dev.D is best enjoyed by half. Director Anurag Kashyap (Black Friday) hurtles through a laundry list of Hindi film taboos and first-evers: Dev taking a leak, dominatrix sex play, ‘fuck’ in the dialogue, a Delhi Metro cameo. Paro moves metronomically in blue light like POV porn; jump-suited Elvises croon Hinglish in a brass-band diss track; three b-boys in zoot suits strut beneath ultraviolet.

But then Kashyap runs out of plot. The second half is an endless, repetitive montage of Dev flying without wings. Bottles stuck to his lips like the tragic idiot in W., Dev is mothered and sponge-bathed by a series of women, though he hardly deserves it. And I’m not sure you can end a Devdas this way without disfiguring the theme.

Still, boat-jawed Abhay Deol has already become what Aamir Khan yet aspires to, an actor of subtlety who emotes with a wrinkle, not a deluge. He consistently picks movies which you can show to angrez friends without prefixing an apology. Our Chanda, Kalki Koechlin, is remarkable, switching seamlessly between Hindi, Tamil, French and English, much like the soundtrack.

Director Kashyap references his own No Smoking, Bhansali’s Devdas, The Edge of Heaven, Trainspotting, Blade Runner, and some other films I couldn’t readily identify (clown paint? And surely the three troubadors aren’t just from a Farrelly Brothers film). If there’s one lazily written character, it’s Paro’s rival, a bra-less tart outlined as sketchily as the bobbed vamp in Yaadein.

I like to think of Dev.D as Kashyap’s continuing apology for penning dialogues in Shakalaka Boom Boom. Its second-half choke aside, Dev.D intercepts the ball thrown by Dil Chahta Hai and runs with it. Listen up, you Yuvvraaj-churning whores. This is how it’s done.

‘Pardesi’ (Foreigner) from the movie:

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