‘Lukkhe’ review: Some highs in an overly ambitious show about drugs, rap music and crime

Set against the restless, neon-tinged underbelly of Chandigarh and soundtracked to Punjabi rap, Lukkhe wants to be many things at once. The Prime Video show created by Agrim Joshi and Debojit Das Purkayastha is a rap saga, a crime thriller, an addiction drama and a story about broken young people trying to regain their footing.

Intoxication, violence and tragedy are embedded in this world. Remorse, revenge and redemption follow.

The eight-episode series opens on a hockey field, an appropriately Punjabi image. In Punjab, drugs are apparently never far away, including for college hockey player Lucky (Lakshvir Singh Saran). But one heady night leads to tragedy and sets Lucky on the path of repentance and rehabilitation.

Sanober (Palak Tiwari), his recovery buddy at the rehab centre, is tackling her own demons. Support gradually turns into attraction. Back to reality, Lucky gets sucked into rap music and drug peddling, while balancing delicate relationships with his single mother, Sanober and a cop (Raashii Khanna) focused on making Punjab drug-free.

The enmity between two rival rappers Badnaam (King) and OG (Shivankit Singh Parihar) impacts the lives of all those around them, particularly Lucky and Sanober. The collision of these lives and subcultures places Lucky in increasingly dangerous situations.

The writing isn’t sensitive enough to the complexities of deaddiction, missing an opportunity to explore how recovery remains fragile when people return to toxic environments. Instead, Lukkhe treats psychological wounds superficially.

It also seems unlikely that two recovering addicts would drift so quickly back into nightclub culture and emotionally volatile spaces without greater consequence.

Director Himank Gaur explores how music and narcotics co-exist and attempts to examine an ecosystem in which rappers, gangsters, addicts, businessmen and police all feed off one another. In such a scenario, how much space is there for righteousness and honesty?

To the show’s credit, its visual language understands this duality better than its screenplay. Every time the narrative slips into intoxication, emotional triggers or psychological delirium, the palette shifts into blues, pinks and purples. The lighting becomes hallucinatory, almost dreamlike.

Lakshvir Singh Saran’s Lucky emerges as the soul of the series. He carries guilt and emotional responsibility with sincerity.

There is immense pressure on Lucky to hold together the lives around him while barely surviving his own recovery. Saran brings restraint, vulnerability and thoughtfulness to the role. His scenes with his mother (Gitikka Ganju) are among the few moments that feel genuinely emotional.

Raashii Khanna’s portrayal of officer Gurbaani, who has her own reasons for wanting a drug-free Chandigarh, forms another solid pillar. At the other end of the spectrum is MC Badnaam/Nihal, played with deadpan stillness by King.

Nihal’s hunger, ego and self-destructive instincts position him as both friend and threat. The “drug family” of Nihal, Sanober, Paddy (Kritika Bharadwaj) and Jazz (Nakul Roshan Sahdev) is held together by circumstance, music, loneliness and loyalty. As Jazz memorably says, they are not bad people, they simply do bad things. That line carries more nuance than much of the screenplay around it.

Rap music dominates the soundtrack, which is a natural fit. There is also a great deal of it – some staged as live performances, some as recording sessions, and others filmed like romantic ballads. While the soundtrack effectively captures the emotional and performative culture of rap, several sequences feel indulgent, occasionally diluting the suspense and narrative urgency.

Lukkhe undermines its own potential through simplistic writing and genre tropes such as corrupt cops, narco queens and comedic hitmen. Too many plot turns occur conveniently. Characters ambush vehicles, steal chemicals, and navigate dangerous situations with little believable planning.

Several supporting characters are reduced to familiar archetypes: the corrupt senior cop perpetually eating while enabling rot around him; the growling chauvinist uncle; the impulsive female inspector constantly barging in to make arrests only to be restrained by male superiors. Even Nihal’s childhood is sketchily written, with its emotional complexity largely glossed over.

Lukkhe is intermittently compelling because of the sincerity in Lucky’s arc and the show’s recurring idea of biological ties and found family. The contrast between Lucky and Nihal becomes the show’s clearest moral framework. Lucky represents accountability and the possibility of rebuilding after failure. Nihal represents the danger of self-mythologising. Sanober symbolises innocence and the weight of baggage.

There are a few moments of stillness, humour, warmth or normalcy that allow the characters to exist outside crime or substance abuse. As a result, the show’s inner world can feel exhausting and detached.