But My name is Khan is no puny feat.

The cinematography is sweeping, even majestic as director, Karan Johar pulls out all the stops to create a heroic journey across the United States, canning a potentially powerful film with mass appeal.

This is a grand love story set amidst the context of terrorism and mistaken identities. But the film does not shy away from addressing the dangerous stereotypes by which Muslims are perceived across the globe.

In My name is Khan, it is a Muslim male who marries a Hindu girl, but it is a radical departure from Bollywood's usual secular Muslim male who often is not seen to practice his faith on screen.

Here, the male protagonist is a practicing Muslim, who prays and is unafraid to lay out a mat at a bus stop and offer pray, even as a musafir (traveller) in a foreign, hostile country.

Furthermore, the film is revolutionary in its extraordinary attempt to get audiences to understand the religious sentimentalism of hijab (headscarf), especially for Muslim women in so-called Western societies who are forced to remove it.

It goes on to make audiences realise what it feels like to be continuously profiled at airports, harassed and singled out in the daily business of life.

In so doing, the film is a significant departure from many Bollywood conventions.

However, My name is Khan, unfortunately, still fails to evade a larger trap.

Rizwan Khan is still not a regular Muslim guy who changes perceptions in the real world. Aspergers Syndrome is used and abused; his emotive inadequacy turns him into a virtual super-hero who can accomplish anything. While designed to confront stereotypes, the film unwittingly panders to another set of stereotypes that is problematic, misleading, and even counter-productive.

It is only Rizwan who manages to successfully straddle the line of tolerance and religiosity without becoming an extremist. It is only Rizwan who is able to see past colour, and religion and caste and treat human beings the same, despite differences.

None of the “ordinary” Muslim characters in the film are naturally tolerant, they are all painted with the same brush: lacking agency, struggling with religion and society and too easily susceptible to extremism.

While My name is Khan turns some stereotypes on their heads, it fails to adequately achieve what Muslims around the world desperately desire: a representation that showcases Muslims as normal human beings, with feelings, ideas, flairs and flaws.

Rizwan Khan becomes an idealistic Muslim and human being - the type that just doesn’t exist.

He is dramatically romanticised and becomes an awful caricature of goodness and morality that you wouldn’t even find in a monk on a hilltop in the Himalayas.

It doesn’t help that the film is too long, and that director Karan Johar simply tried to do too much.

Granted, the film is located in a difficult historical context of a changing US, but Johar included too many nuances in the making of this inter-faith epic.  Rizwan finds himself helping poor African-Americans in Georgia hit by severe cyclones and flooding ala Hurricane Katrina style that turned New Orleans into a suburb of Bangladesh.

That Shah Rukh Khan took on the mantle of playing a Muslim in distress, also presents a rare opportunity to challenge rising Islamophobia in popular mass media, where ideas, mindsets and even sentiment are most likely to be tested. It is very rare that Bollywood stars risk their secular star status by straying into the often lion’s den of India’s religious politics. But Shah Rukh is also the film’s co-producer, effectively pointing to a vested interest in curtailing the rampant stereotyping in mass media, which created the stereotypes in the first place.

Consider further that the film has been marketed and distributed by Fox Searchlight in the US and by 20th Century Fox International across the globe; the film enjoys the identical access to the biggest audiences worldwide. Considered in this light, and My name is Khan is suddenly even more important.

My name is Khan is intense, even overtly dramatic, but it easily personifies how macro-level politics and severe misrepresentation can tear apart communities, households and even two people. The pairing of Kajol and Shah Rukh, Indian’s cinema’s most iconic couple, united after almost a decade apart, turns the film into an epic Bollywood love story, where religious and racial intolerance must be defeated for their love to conquer.

My name is Khan is still definitely well worth the watch.

• Azad Essa is a freelance journalist, lecturer and aspiring filmmaker.