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‘A Nice Indian Boy’ Review: Bollywood Dreams Come True In an Appealing Indian American Romcom


Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff star in 'A Nice Indian Boy,' Roshan Sethi's queer love story between an Indian American doctor and a white photographer.

That he’s gay puts him in the less traditionally masculine role of the one seeking a suitor; that his “nice Indian boy” is in fact Jay ( Jonathan Groff), a white man raised in Naveen’s culture, is the more complicating factor in director Roshan Sethi ‘s bright, big-hearted if overly tidy third feature. The film opens on the wedding of Naveen’s smart, attractive older sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) to a handsome, eminently approvable Indian man — a dream outcome for the siblings’ loving but anxiously status-fixated immigrant parents, Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel), who were themselves married by arrangement back in India. As a romance, it’s slightly less satisfying, in large part because Jay — played with typically wholesome warmth by Groff — remains more of a concept than a character, negotiating this unusual clash of sensibilities (if not cultures, exactly) with such unflagging grace and maturity and, well, niceness that he begins to seem a little too good to be true.

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