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There’s a point midway through 3 Idiots where the movie rises above a diverting entertainment to something altogether sensational. It’s also a scene that is, like the other great parts of this great Hindi film, devastatingly funny. Aamir Khan’s Rancho and Madhavan’s Farhan visit the home of their friend Raju, (Sharman Joshi) which is basically a hovel located in a chawl that, as Farhan tells us in his voice-over, reminds us in every way of a 1950s black & white Hindi film. The kind that a scraggly, wet-eyed Balraj Sahni might have starred in. Hirani realizes this scene aptly by instantly overlaying a scratchy black and white filter and injecting a nasally, sappy score that would make the hardest of hearts weep, and that, (conversely or consequently) leaves the rest of us in hysterics. The scene is a fantastically written, perfectly acted moment (I can’t find the name of the brilliant woman playing Raju’s mother, but she is the centerpiece of this jaw-dropping, rib-tickler) and it also marks the point at which 3 Idiots propels itself, without looking back, towards a place where it successfully reminds us– we, the weary Hindi film-goer, we, the Idiots–why Hindi films even worked for us in the first place.

This is not Rajkumar Hirani’s best film. You’d have to ask someone who’s less of a fan of the Munnabhai series for a more objective answer to that question but given just how much admiration I have for those previous gems, this is in no way a knock on 3 Idiots. This latest work represents an important and more affecting departure for Hirani by giving him darker material to work with, which, regardless of the dour depths plumbed, never alters his overarching worldview—in which the horrors of modern Indian life need to be constantly negotiated with the varying doses of good and evil inherent in both hero and villain alike. Hirani had a wonderful guide though these “negotiations” in his previous works with Sanjay Dutt’s Munnabhai, who was really always teetering between “good” and “evil” throughout his adventures. Hirani continues to probe these ideas in the latest film but he goes about it without his immensely charming icon.

Which makes the resulting film all the more impressive. Using the now very common Hindi film tactic of a “tripartite protagonist,” (one that owes more than a little debt to Manmohan Desai’s masterful masala picture “Amar, Akbar, Anthony”) Hirani gives us a look at the experience of being a student at an institution through a trio of friends whose chemistry feels as comfortable and natural as a pair of well-worn shoes (or in the case of this movie, tighty-whiteys) and that has entirely to do with the fact that we have seen this kind of character structure innumerable times before. But even as the characters and their interplay feels wholly familiar, there is a miraculous sense of newness in these relationships that either has something to do with the honesty and respect for tradition with which they were written, or the general carelessness with which most other characters in Hindi cinema are conceived these days. Maybe it’s a little of both.

Whatever it is, the characters played by Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor are truly memorable. They all have a separate but equal part in the overall journey that the film takes and they all crucially maintain a precarious, important balance that this movie lives on. It would be criminal to give away some of the stuff that happens in 3 Idiots because one risks not only giving away really fun plot points, but, more importantly, incredibly funny jokes. And one can talk about the visuals (which is never a Hirani strong point, but he takes some really bold steps on that count and continues his love for exuberant, pastel-inflected landscapes) or the soundtrack (which is really piss-poor but comes alive onscreen) or the acting or anything else. But this film’s real pull is its script, which may not seem especially new but not for a second comes across as stale or uninspired. This is the definition of a well-written screenplay; it has structure and it has a sense of pace. It has terrific dialogue. Its greatest achievement, though, is that it revitalizes Hindi film melodrama in a way that strips it of the pejorative stain of bad filmmaking that it has for so long (and often rightly) been wedded to in Hindi film criticism.

This is where the “Balraj Sahni” scene is crucial. That moment is not a sight gag, as much as it might play as one. Hirani makes several visual nods to that earlier, chiaroscuro-ed age of Hindi film—the age of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy—and he does this because his film shares a commonality of spirit with those movies, if not quite the auteurist ambitions or the grave tones. Hirani makes films that have a pronounced (perhaps, at times, overly-pronounced) social conscience, and a clear political leaning, but, importantly, he makes films without jettisoning the entertainment that any Hindi film lover craves. He in fact places the audience’s engagement at the forefront of his overall agenda, so that when the messages do sneak up on us (or bludgeon us) they don’t feel like lectures given to us by a professor more interested in regurgitating material than teaching. They feel like points of an engaging conversation with a friend that takes sometimes-sudden, sometimes-natural turns into more serious territory.

And there are gravely serious moments in this film. 3 Idiots in some ways is about saving human lives that are under constant assault from the pressures of a growing, imposing modern existence—one in which institutions privilege results over lives. There are moments here that you would never find in a Munnabhai movie. Hirani’s skill in balancing these moments with the lighter stuff is golden. And his casting of Aamir Khan pays off immensely in the sense that he has an actor who can play both sides of the dramatic spectrum equally well, and a star who shares his interests and who here extends some of the lessons he started in his own directorial attempt, Tare Zameen Par. Khan’s film, like Hirani’s, is about thinking differently. About approaching your life and your work with an active sense of your place in the universe. Given the quality of the work both men have given us within this decade, it makes total sense that they would combine their talents at the end of it to create a film that sends exactly this kind of message. These are thoughtful filmmakers who wear their politics on their sleeve.

I could have done without the constant ass jokes. I could probably have done without Boman Irani’s incredibly irritating performance (a rare deal for this actor who I adore) and I could have used a Rahman soundtrack in place of this boring Moitra deal. But these are criticisms that disappear under the shadow of a grand entertainment. Part of the success of this film is its fearlessness in getting a little silly, a little ridiculous. Most films these days are so busy being cool that they forget to be good! A few years ago, when I wrote on Lage Raho Munnabhai, I said that I’d found a kindred spirit to Sathyan Anthikkad’s glorious Malayalam films from the 1980s. 3 Idiots continues to carry the torch of that cinema forward but it is, without question, a decidedly Hindi film. This movie is made by a man who knows what makes Hindi films tick. He knows its problems and its peaks. He has a sense for the magic that makes us return to Hindi films, that makes us privilege the best of them over films that on critical terms or otherwise might be “better” in some way or a number of ways. He knows how to make them and he knows how to make them so well that that we are, as is the case with most great mainstream Indian films, willing to forgive the blemishes, no matter how prominent in the span of a three hour run, if only the beauty—in all its manifestations—could last just a bit longer.