Lena Khan’s Best of the Best arrives Friday on Netflix, bringing a Bollywood fusion dance story to the screen with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan at its center. The film follows childhood best friends Maya and Anjali as they join UCLA’s competitive dance team, a setup that puts the movie’s movement, music and identity politics in the same frame from the start.
That is why the premiere is drawing attention now. Khan has spent years building the film, and the script from Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam was shaped by people who knew the world from the inside: both men competed in similar circuits growing up, Minhaj’s wife danced competitively, and Venkataramanujam performed with a Chai Town a cappella team. The result is a movie that uses a college dance team story to make a broader point about South Asian confidence on screen.
For Ramakrishnan, the role meant entering a world she had never actually lived. She had never danced competitively before landing the part, then went through months of intensive training before cameras rolled. Khan pushed hard for that transformation, telling her she needed “some Channing Tatum energy” and a “complete athletic transformation.” In a film built around performance, that preparation is not background texture; it is the engine that makes the choreography believable.
Khan also did her homework before the shoot. She spent time with UCLA’s own dance team and traveled to North Carolina to watch competitions, trying to understand how the atmosphere moves beyond the stage. That research shows up in the film’s choreography, which was built with Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman, with Joya Kazi credited as co-choreographer. The dance language pulls from Kuthu, Bharatanatyam and Pakistani-influenced movement, matching a fictional team whose identity is stitched together from more than one tradition.
The friction behind the film is cultural as much as technical. Khan has said South Asians are used to not even having their own self-respect, even while she was trying to make a movie that says they can be proud of what they do. She has also argued that when there is more than one minority character, they stop being shorthand and become real people, allowing the story to focus on the humanity between them. That gives Best of the Best a sharper aim than a standard dance movie: it is not just trying to win a competition, but to widen the range of who gets to be seen as confident, funny and fully formed.
The question now is how much of that work will register in the finished film. Competitive Bollywood fusion dance has been part of campus life for decades, but scripted features about it have been rare, and productions of this kind often have far less time than a typical dance movie would allow. If the training and compressed shoot hold together, Friday’s premiere could give Netflix a rare college dance film that feels both technically sharp and culturally specific from the first routine to the last.
