Tamil superstar films have never really been about plots. They are carefully orchestrated public festivals where cinema merely provides the excuse. The screenplay is often only the rope holding together fireworks, punchy dialogues, songs, nostalgia and collective emotion. Jana Nayagan understands that better than most. The audience inside a packed Chennai theatre on Friday morning – the first day-first show (FDFS) – was not simply watching Vijay’s final film. They were watching their Chief Minister dance, lecture, campaign, comfort grieving families, attack corruption, defend secularism and eventually walk into a fictional Secretariat – while several members of his real Cabinet quietly appeared alongside him. That alone makes Jana Nayagan unlike anything Indian cinema has seen. The story itself races through prisons, civil wars in fictional Swasnia in Africa, international arms syndicates, terrorism, communal violence, corrupt politicians and psychological trauma. It is gloriously overstuffed. Yet nobody inside the theatre seemed worried about where the story was heading. They were waiting for the next arrival. The next “blast”, as Vijay’s character himself says in it. The first …