‘Lukkhe’: Vice without a voice

As Prime Video’s ‘Lukkhe’ opens on a sprawling hockey ground in Chandigarh, an “Appan fatne wale hai” ushers viewers into the sort of bad Punjabi awkwardly stapled onto Hindi that I assumed Bollywood had buried sometime around 2012, along with “Balle Balle” caricatures.

Barely a few minutes in — after a volley of mangled obscenities and a painfully misplaced “Kake” hurled at someone clearly the same age — the Punjabi in me let out a sigh so deep it could have qualified as background score. Predictably, the rest of the eight-parter never escapes that crater of imitation.

‘Lukkhe’ claims to excavate the drug-ridden underbelly of Punjab — men here repeatedly remind us they are Punjabi men — but the series possesses not even a whiff of Punjabiyat. It insists on Chandigarh as both backdrop and personality, yet captures none of the city’s strange, geometric pulse: no texture, no lived-in familiarity, none of the quiet neon-and-concrete absurdity that makes Chandigarh Chandigarh.

The plot follows Lucky (Lakshvir Singh Saran), a hot-blooded college hockey player with Canada visa dreams, whose life spirals after a pill-fuelled crash kills his friend Aman and lands him in rehab. There, assigned “recovery buddy” Sanober (Palak Tiwari) romances her way into his life with a “If we never become friends, we’ll never get out of here” logic.

Elsewhere, rapper-druglord MC Badnaam (King) personally cooks his coveted pill “Demon” behind his studio — refreshing, perhaps, that fame has not distanced him from the manufacturing process.

Orbiting him are rival rapper OG (Shivankit Singh Parihar), nightclub chaos, and righteous cop Gurbaani (Raashii Khanna), who wages war on Punjab’s drug menace partly by wearing an astonishingly obvious grey wig to a club undercover.

The show arrives carrying lofty ambitions about the nexus between Punjab’s gun-and-drugs-infatuated rap culture and the state’s violence-soaked undercurrents. Yet it fails to meaningfully engage with any of it, weighed down by superficial plotlines, below-average dialogue, and a relentless fixation on only the most scandalous fragments of its narrative.

Around episode one’s halfway mark, you realise that the series eagerly sacrifices logic at the altar of convenience. A voiceover informs us Lucky avoids jail because Aman’s father requested rehab instead — apparently Indian courts now function like family WhatsApp polls. Elsewhere, Gurbaani conveniently berates a corrupt, fat senior exactly when exposition requires it.

The writing mistakes noise for depth and shock for storytelling; characters snort, scream, swagger and commit dialect atrocities like “Te mujhe…” with such relentless artificiality that scarcely anyone evolves into something recognisably human.

Which is frustrating because parts of the show genuinely work.

King’s music and domineering yet layered performance are excellent; the psychedelic cinematography refreshingly unhinged; and Saran shines as the underserved Lucky, capturing fear, rage and vulnerability beneath the bravado with effortless ease.

Tiwari — though sometimes forgettable — emerges most grounded, while Khanna lends sincerity to material often undeserving of it.

The tragedy is not merely that the show is under-researched. What frustrates more is that its logline brushes against one of Punjab’s most unspoken crises: as the state reels under violence and narcotics, sections of its rap culture glamorise the very same for children young enough to memorise the lyrics before understanding the damage. Yet ‘Lukkhe’ never explores this beyond the level of poster aesthetics.

Punjab deserves far better than this tourist-brochure vision of decay — that gawks endlessly at the state’s wounds without ever understanding either the people or the pain beneath them.