Rang De Basanti starts as a genial Bollywood trifle about a plucky, Hindi-speaking British gamine named Sue (Alice Patten) travelling in India and then congeals into a slickly amped-up political thriller. What's remarkable, however, is that it survives this unexpected mutation. The film is too sprightly to be serious, but darned if it's not compelling because of -- rather than in spite of -- its tonal inconsistencies.

The early passages -- which find Sue recruiting college kids in Delhi to star in her self-produced docudrama about Indian revolutionaries in the 1920s -- unfurl at a zippy MTV pace: it's hard not to smile at the sight of Aamir Khan acting about half his age as DJ, a cool, leader-of-the-pack type looking for a cause to rebel against. He finds it in Sue's film and convinces his dubious pals to help out, but our would-be agitproppers, stymied by all manner of gut-clutching catastrophes, decide to become activists for real. As a call to arms, Rang De Basanti is unconvincing. As unhinged spectacle, it's aces.