Filmmaker Roshan Sethi’s sophomore feature film A Nice Indian Boy opened at last year’s SXSW Film Festival to moderate acclaim. An adaptation of Madhuri Shekar’s play of the same name, the culturally specific queer rom-com is finally receiving a limited theatrical release after spending over a year in release schedule limbo. After having seen the film, I wish it had a distributor with some more cash behind it, because this really is a film with something for just about any audience. A Nice Indian Boy is a total delight, boasted by a collection of lovely performances and a warm, empathetic and hysterically funny screenplay that gives every member of its ensemble a great deal to work with.

Naveen (Karan Soni) is a 30-something gay doctor living in New York. Having grown up in a very loud, very warm and very loving Indian family, he’s always gone to the big family weddings and wondered what his own might look like. And even though his relationship with his parents (Zarna Garg and Harish Patel) is quite loving, the expectations society and extended family has placed on him have prevented him from really putting himself out there. One day he meet cutes at a Hindu temple with Jay (Jonathan Groff), a photographer with whom he can’t deny his shared chemistry. As their relationship progresses and the concept of marriage is put on the table, Naveen and Jay’s relationship will face its most difficult obstacle yet – introducing Jay to his parents.

I loved just about every single moment of A Nice Indian Boy. It’s old fashioned and progressive at the same time – a shamelessly big-hearted queer rom com with delightful performances across the board, a sharp screenplay that is always one step ahead of the viewer, addressing every single problem they might possibly pinpoint with this story, and a filmmaker’s eye that is clearly so full of love and appreciation for the communities it’s representing. There is so much cultural specificity on display here and such a loving, sympathetic approach to the family we’re born into and the families we find in life along the way, and this thing is just overflowing with love and joy and emotional catharsis. Oh, and we end the film on a big, exuberant and delightful tribute to Bollywood cinema and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Karan Soni will be familiar to audiences due to his appearances in the Deadpool movies, and he’s a character actor with quite the illustrious resume of credits, but this is my first experience with him in a lead role, and he’s fantastic. He brings so much heart to this character, and all aspects of his personality feel real and the relationship with his family feels lived-in and genuine. Madhuri Shekar and Eric Randall’s script does such an effective job of getting you into Naveen’s head early on and keeping us invested in his emotional journey. This character has clearly dealt with a lot of internalized trauma, and a big takeaway for me here is that everyone has. We all walk around every day with trauma – we’re all feeling a little bit sad, a little bit angry most of the time. But the way we overcome that and our relationships with one another say more about us than what we don’t talk about.

As a big fan of musical theatre, I’d gone into this with perhaps the most knowledge of star Jonathan Groff’s career. He’s a Tony-winning stage actor best known for shows like Spring Awakening and this most recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along, but audiences will also know him from shows like Glee and HBO’s tragically underrated Looking. I began to worry that this character could be something problematic, as we have this white guy who is fully locked into all things dealing with Indian culture. But the more we learn about Jay, who was orphaned and adopted by Indian parents, the more genuine this person, and therefore this relationship, becomes. You really are rooting for these two people, both dealing with their own traumas and insecurities, to figure things out. And I think you need two performers as talented as Soni and Groff to sell that to audiences.

Zarna Garg stars as Naveen’s mother Megha, and she’s a comedian who has never acted in a feature film before, and I never would have known it. She’s full of exuberance and charm, and she’s hilarious. She also has a standout moment near the end of the film that almost brought me to tears. The same is true for Harish Patel, starring as Naveen’s father Archit. Patel is a character actor with numerous credits, but he’s never quite stood out like he does here. He’s also got this moment towards the third act where his character finally begins to bond with the Jay character, and that thing happened where I started to feel myself tear up, but I was pretending not to, because I felt like my own reaction might have looked over the top. It brought me great comfort to hear audience sniffles coming from every angle around me.

Sunita Mani also co-stars as Naveen’s sister Arundhathi, and I mainly remember her from 2020’s horror comedy film Save Yourselves!, but she has appeared in a lot of other things as well, most recently last month’s Death of a Unicorn. She’s terrific here as well, bringing a lot to a character that could be much less if the writing wasn’t there. But I think the same thing is true for each member of our supporting cast. These actors are given the material it takes to make all of these characters the most they can be, and the resulting film is incredibly memorable.

As I was watching A Nice Indian Boy, my mind kept going back to My Big Fat Greek Wedding (the first one, not the sequels). There’s a distinctly queer point of view in Sethi’s film, no doubt, but even more striking is the cultural specificity on display here, and the love for the communities the film is representing. In a just world and not one that was actively being overthrown by a fascist dictatorship, A Nice Indian Boy would be as big of a hit as Greek Wedding was back in 2002, if not bigger. There really is something here for just about any viewer and I can’t wait to watch it again.