Mogul Mowgli, London Film Festival, review: a mesmerising Riz Ahmed discovers fame isn’t everything

Dir: Bassam Tariq; Cast: Riz Ahmed, Alyy Khan, Sudha Bhuchar, Nabhaan Rizwan, Anjana Vasan, Aiysha Hart; Cert TBC, 90 min.

Riz Ahmed is a major actor, so furiously present in Mogul Mowgli it gives you a new appreciation of his talent. He co-wrote this intensely personal film with its director, Bassam Tariq, to address their shared inheritance and sense of being torn between two worlds.

The character Ahmed’s playing, a British-Pakistani rapper called Zed who’s just on the cusp of making it big, isn’t exactly a self-portrait, but he’s plugged into a fizzing, high-voltage circuit Ahmed knows his way around better than most. “Where I’m from is kind of long,” he tells a crowd, in one of the film’s handful of bracing performance pieces.

A west-Londoner who has put Muslim traditions some way behind in the rear-view – adopting Zed as a moniker over Zaheer, for instance – he’s been absent from his family for two years, taking up residence in New York while on tour. Just as he’s getting frustrated by plateauing opportunities, he gets offered an opening slot for one Dante Smith (the real-life name of Mos Def, who Ahmed supported as a grime artist, “Riz MC”, early in his own development). It means a return to London for the first leg of that tour, enabling a reconnection with his folks (Alyy Khan and Sudha Bhuchar), even as it forces a break-up with his current girlfriend Bina (Aiysha Hart).

At the same time, he suffers a crippling physical collapse which puts this professional boost in jeopardy. Zed’s diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder, likely to be hereditary, meaning that his body is mistakenly attacking itself, and all strength in his legs gives way. About half the film confines him to a hospital bed, where he deliriously hallucinates, like a much less toe-tapping equivalent of Roy Scheider’s Bob Fosse in All That Jazz.

No one would call Mogul Mowgli a horror film, but it’s layered like an existential nightmare which brings all of Zed’s insecurities home to roost. He feels too old and about to be superseded – “I’m stuck at this f***ing bullshit level,” he complains in bed to his manager (Anjana Vasan), who sells him out by lining up a younger guy called RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan) – a lascivious moron with laughable face tattoos – to take his slot. RPG even pays him a hospital visit to claim this is a case of influence being faithfully handed down – “There’s no Drake without Whoopi Goldberg,” he points out by way of misguided homage.

Made on a palpably low budget, Mogul Mowgli is a scratchy, experimental endeavour which indulges itself too waywardly at times – the trippy interludes and sense of inertia can make for an oddly long 90 minutes. But when it confronts Zed’s sense of cultural dislocation head on, some brilliantly dangerous scenes result. In an alleyway outside his local mosque, Zed is accosted by a supposed fan who demands a selfie, mistakes his identify, and upbraids him for using the wrong hand to pass a joint over – an escalation of micro-assaults that makes C-list celebrity out to be a deeply convincing hell.

There’s also a bad dream of a rap battle more scalding than anything in 8 Mile, when Zed – spot-lit in his hospital gown – gets denigrated in clever rhyme-scenes as a P**i, to gleeful applause, but can’t comment on his opponent’s skin colour without being booed off-stage. These moments resonate because of Ahmed’s unsparing honesty in writing and performing them – as with several other squirmy set-pieces, including one in a sperm clinic, a drama-school monologue just waiting to happen, where he contacts his bewildered ex by phone.

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved. We even get a home-video snapshot of Ahmed as a child, pulling focus – “Me! keep the camera on me!” – with startlingly precocious narcissism.

It’s characteristically brave of him to give that up, but the truth is ever clearer: distracting us away from Riz Ahmed in any Riz Ahmed vehicle is going to be a whopping task.

In UK cinemas from October 30