An Appealing Queer Romantic Comedy

The prize catch of the title isn’t exactly who you might expect in “A Nice Indian Boy,” a romantic comedy that brings a welcome queer angle to that substantial subgenre of love stories tangled up in Indian social mores and cross-generational family politics. In many such films, Naveen (Karan Soni) would be the most desirable of matches for a female protagonist: good-looking, well-spoken and a working doctor. 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.

Still, Sethi and screenwriters Eric Randall — adapting a stage play by Madhuri Shekar — aren’t out to subvert every trope and tradition in the book. From its meet-cute in a Hindu temple to its easily resolved second-act breakup to its culminating, colorful wedding dance, “A Nice Indian Boy” offers few structural surprises, hewing closely to a classic romcom template that for a long time wasn’t available to queer characters — much less queer characters of color. Indeed, the film rather neatly lampshades its own conventions by quoting directly from Bollywood — specifically the ‘90s classic “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” — as it delivers its characters the cornball happy ending of their daydreams. For a certain audience, this festival crowdpleaser (a SXSW premiere back in March) might set a similarly aspirational bar.

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. Resisting invitations to the dancefloor, Naveen…