Best of the Best is now streaming on Netflix. The 112-minute comedy is directed by Lena Khan, whose previous feature work includes Flora & Ulysses.
Ramakrishnan plays Maya opposite Kedia's Anjali. The two have been friends since childhood and enter UCLA's competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team together, eventually setting their sights on the US championship.
The team quickly becomes more than a shared extracurricular activity. Rehearsals, hierarchy and competitive pressure begin exposing differences in how the two friends see themselves and what they want from college.
The dance competition is really a stress test for the friendship
Writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam describe the film in terms of friendship, sisterhood and self-acceptance rather than simply winning a trophy.
Maya enters the story with far more outward confidence. She pushes Anjali toward the team and tends to move first, argue first and think about consequences later.
Anjali is in a different place. Much of her identity has been shaped by being the reliable daughter and unconditional friend, and the dance team forces her to consider who she might be when those roles stop defining every decision.
Bollywood fusion is not being treated as colorful background
Minhaj and Venkataramanujam drew on their own college experiences around South Asian student communities and competitive dance culture. Both remembered teams functioning as social centers as well as demanding creative organizations.
That specificity matters. The characters are not professional dancers living in a sealed entertainment industry. Many are ordinary college students trying to balance demanding academic lives with hours of rehearsal every night.
Khan describes the scene as intensely competitive, full of cliques, artistic disagreements and performers who take the work with absolute seriousness.
Kedia has compared the emotional intensity to Dance Moms drama. The joke works because, from inside the team, none of it feels small.
Lena Khan wants the performances to feel bigger than everyday college life
Khan cites Dope and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse among the visual influences behind the film. Her goal was a music-video energy with fashion and movement given an editorial sharpness rather than treating the dance scenes as simple coverage of choreography.
That approach fits a screenplay she describes as several genres operating at once. Best of the Best is a dance competition film, a friendship story, a campus comedy and a coming-of-age drama sharing the same stage.
The performances therefore become moments when the movie can expand beyond the naturalism of dorms, classrooms and rehearsals.
Hasan Minhaj also steps into the ensemble
Minhaj plays professor Hamza Latif and produces alongside Venkataramanujam through 186K Films. Jonathan Eirich produces through Rideback.
The wider cast includes Ankur Rathee, Chaneil Kular, Shreya Navile, Becky Alex, Nihar Duvvuri, Nico Greetham, Amryn Khurana, Tanishq Joshi, Lilly Singh, Sasha Bhasin, Janina Gavankar, Saara Chaudry and Kavi Ramachandran.
That ensemble helps the movie function as a community story rather than an isolated two-person drama. Teammates, professors, friends and family all affect the way Maya and Anjali understand their place in the group.
Netflix is using a familiar YA structure in a less familiar cultural space
Minhaj and Venkataramanujam have openly cited To All the Boys I've Loved Before as an important tonal influence, particularly its mix of tenderness, comedy and coming-of-age emotion.
Best of the Best uses equally recognizable ingredients: lifelong friends, a new social group, competitive ambition and the possibility that growing up may send two people who love each other in different directions.
What gives those ingredients a different identity is the setting. This college story is built through South Asian American community life, Bollywood performance and a competitive circuit rarely given the center of a mainstream streaming comedy.
Best of the Best is streaming now on Netflix.
