Writer-director Vikramjit Singh‘s debut feature film “Roy” stars Arjun Rampal (“Ra.One,” 2011) as filmmaker and ladies’ man Kabir Grewal, who’s suffering through intermittent writer’s blocks in his attempt to finish his screenplay for “Guns 3,” the third installment of a popular action-heist series he’s helmed. Trying to take control of his life, he decides to do a Fellini and writes as he films. Enter British indie filmmaker Ayesha Aamir (Jacqueline Fernandez; “Murder 2,” 2011), who he falls for, but his inner demons and Casanova-like image stand in the way.

An artist’s process is often messy and impulsive and rarely feels honest when captured in movies. Charlie Kaufman’s “Adaptation.” (2002) and Leena Yadav’s “Shabd” (Eng. Transl.: “Word,” 2005) are amongst the few that really capture the chaos of it all and how far an artist can go to craft their creation. Singh’s “Roy” is somewhere in the middle, opting for a more grounded storytelling—not that the movie doesn’t take any swings of surrealism, because its narrative parallelly cuts to a film-inside-a-film story of an art thief and the woman he falls for (which is “Guns 3,” the movie Kabir is in the process of writing).

The “Guns 3” viewers of “Roy” get to see is taken right out of the recesses of Kabir’s mind—a highly stylized romantic thriller in which Roy (Ranbir Kapoor; “Rockstar,” 2011) is an art thief who aims to seduce the wealthy and beautiful Tia Desai (also essayed by Fernandez) to steal a rare painting she owns. The narrative of the metafilm parallels its writer’s many inspirations. While its protagonist is as stoic as Kabir, waxing lyrical about his existence and purpose in life in the way his creator’s carefully crafted persona plays out in public, his art heist is snatched right out of a news report he absently witnesses of a high-profile theft in an art gallery in Malaysia—it’s also where “Guns 3” is majorly set.

And then there’s Tia, whose parallels to Kabir’s real life couldn’t be more evident if you tried. His interactions with Ayesha make her an unwitting muse for the leading lady and Roy’s love interest in “Guns 3”. Tia and Roy’s flirtatious banter hauntingly echoes Ayesha’s first rendezvous with the director in a primarily empty restaurant/lounge, where Kabir tries to charm his way into a conversation with her. Unfortunately for him, Ayesha knows of him and asks, “Are you who the world says you are? Or are you trying your hardest to pretend to be the persona the world has crafted of you?”

The protagonists speak to each other like they’re Dickensian characters in the garb of real people in natural settings—almost too much like the characters of Kabir’s own film, or, to have a straighter parallel to our lives, Ridley Scott’s stylish, sexy crime thriller “The Counselor,” written by author Cormac McCarthy like a literary novel, where people speak in metaphors to foreshadow eventual storytelling payoffs. There’s this effortless chemistry between Rampal and Fernandez when conversing, a la Jesse and Celine from Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy.

An excellent scene between the second and third acts of “Roy” is where fantasy almost breaks the fourth wall, giving viewers an expectations-versus-reality moment that has a glossy buildup—Ayesha walks over to Kabir’s table in slow-motion, smiling at him, the music swelling up—with the payoff sending both him and the viewers crashing back into a reality that’s a lot more depressing. And for the time that shows Kabir completely unable to write, a scene in “Guns 3” has Roy, who’s only recently stolen a painting, laying low, his boat in the middle of the sea, almost lifeless—like it’s in some kind of limbo. We keep returning to that boat just stuck there, just like its writer’s flow: suspended in a frustrating, neverending form of stasis.

Singh’s film isn’t the classic it could have been, though, thanks to a lot of narrative overindulgence that often threatens to derail itself. A scene involves Ayesha showing some vulnerability and telling Kabir about her unfulfilled dreams of being a ballet dancer. And then—out of nowhere—she just breaks into a dance while Kabir watches. While the scene itself feels at home in the stylized literary-novel-esque screenwriting, sometimes you just have to know when to draw the line. The soundtrack is filled with a ton of chart-busting Hindi singles, and it’s an otherwise heady set of bops to listen to, but its presence oddly overstuffs the film’s narrative and overstays its welcome just a bit.

None of this makes the film any less watchable, though; “Roy” is still a stunningly filmed and finely acted drama boasting dazzling photography by Himman Dhamija (“The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey,” 2005) and Dipika Kalra’s (“Lootera;” Eng. Transl: “Robber,” 2013) whipsmart structural editing. It’s obvious Singh is in love with the process of his craft, and it’s a fun, almost poetic insight into the messy mind of an artist. The film’s biggest hamartia isn’t itself; it’s how it is marketed. 

The text of the official trailer of “Roy” implies the life of a celebrated filmmaker who witnesses a robbery and gets entangled in a high-stakes game of love, loss, and lethality. The film’s text is about a man in love writing a romantic thriller and experiencing awful writer’s block stemming from various internal and external conflicts. Could it have been a whole lot more than it is? Absolutely. But what it is in its current form is a flawed but endlessly fascinating film that deserves a lot of love. And a lot of repeat viewings, too.