Its box-office intake would confirm My Stupid Boss as a hit, but I’d suspected as much in the first minute of watching it, when I and three hijab-wearing, popcorn-cradling older ladies beside me laughed simultaneously.

Movie audiences in Jakarta, Indonesia’s megacity of 30 million people, are always diverse – inevitably so, since this is the immigrant-drawing, melting-pot capital of a multiracial, multireligious archipelago nation. Around me sit groups of teenagers, couples of every age bracket, ethnic Chinese Indonesians and visibly-pious Muslims, conspicuous consumers and the working-class, people from profoundly different corners of the city. I – who am Australian – started going to Indonesian cinemas because I was curious to know how Indonesian filmmakers crafted movies for such a staggeringly-wide potential audience. Now, I go simply because I enjoy them: Indonesian films appeal to me, too.

Munching popcorn in Jakarta theatres, I find myself thinking – mainstream, middlebrow cinema has a vital role to play. Movies with broad appeal, featuring stories and characters many different people can relate to, help us see that the citizens of highly-diverse societies, and the inhabitants of a world increasingly riven by international and intercultural tensions, have certain fundamental things in common.

Indonesia makes a lot of romantic dramas. Two people, invariably affluent Jakarta professionals, have their relationship tested by various pressures: endless distractions, choices and obstacles intrude on them as they ride subways, eat out expensively, and chill beside awesome-looking swimming pools. Most recently, Twivortiare told the story of a couple, one banker, one surgeon, who were juggling busy careers and arguing continuously because of it, but kept trying to make their relationship work and thus find sustainable happiness in the big smoke. I’m not a doctor or banker, and don’t own a swimming pool, things I suspect were also true of most others in the theatre with me. Yet the story’s fundamentals, its portrayal of modern life, spoke to me – as it did to those around me, judging from the sniffling.

Then there are comedies. Their dialogue often gets very slangy, many jokes go over my head: but much of the humour, I find, operates beyond language. My Stupid Boss drew laughs just from the boss’s waddling walk and hectoring speech, the way his arrogance was visibly undimmed by repeated, self-created failures, and by the way the film’s heroine was exhausted by him yet never stopped standing up to his absurdities. Such bosses are everywhere, all over Jakarta, all around the world – and seeing them lampooned is apparently a universal pleasure.

One proven hit-maker of recent years is the comedian-turned-filmmaker Ernest Prakasa. His first film, Ngenest, drew heavily on his experience as a racial minority – he is Chinese Indonesian, a group that often faces discrimination. His new film, Imperfect, is likewise preoccupied with questions of inclusivity versus exclusion, fair and unfair treatment to people who are different – this time about a woman mocked for weight and physical appearance. Indonesians like Ernest Prakasa’s films. I like them too. In scenes of schoolyard or workplace bullying and casual stereotyping, and self-criticism and self-doubt, typically poignant and funny simultaneously, we – we – see worlds with certain details that are unfamiliar to us. But we also see worlds not so unknown: stories whose fundamentals are entirely recognisable to Muslim, Chinese and Western viewers all; casts of characters with whom we have no difficulties empathising.

I rarely watch American films in Indonesia. They’re still here, though not to the extent they once were – local movies now account for around half of ticket sales. The superhero franchises are most visible, with a smattering of other action and horror: Terminator, It. I watch their trailers, and see their posters hanging in cinema lobbies. What they show Hollywood as offering – shields, orbs, daggers, helmets, lasers, capes, explosions, and very little else – is a narrow conception indeed of what sort of shared stories can bring together audiences in America and Asia.

Yet during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when American films dominated Asia so comprehensively that they have been dubbed the ‘first global vernacular’, when Asians in Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Batavia (Jakarta’s old name) and Shanghai attended American films in unprecedented droves, superhero franchises weren’t on the billing. When Asians went to Hollywood films in that era, they were watching stories of star-crossed lovers. Or stories about struggles for various types of freedom over various types of authority – one young Indonesian, named Sukarno, was a big fan of American Westerns in the decade before he declared national independence, became Indonesia’s founding President, and led an anti-colonial revolution. Or comedies, featuring humour of a particular, universal type – Charlie Chaplin, drawing his laughs wordlessly, was a huge star in Asia, City Lights and Modern Times giant hits. Hollywood’s current hypothesis that Marvel-esque content is the only area of common ground between Asian and Western audiences is demonstrably historically false.

In the past, what worked in Asia was Bogart and Bacall, white hats vanquishing black hats, comical failures to maintain dignity on the factory-floor or dance-floor. Hollywood films were portraying visions of modernity – salient in Asian port cities whose residents had left old ways of life far behind. But more than that, Hollywood offered stripped-down, simple stories of human struggles and human experience – precisely the sort of stories now drawing me to Indonesian films.

What was the secret of classical Hollywood’s Asian success? The film scholar Miriam Hansen has pointed to America’s multicultural society. In the process of finding common denominators to bind together a deeply-diverse citizenry, pursuing stories which crossed cultural lines to speak to all types of Americans, Hollywood products seamlessly gained a competitive edge beyond America, as well. That Hollywood was so heavily influenced by immigrant filmmakers reinforced this trend. European-born writers and directors, as new Americans, brought to their work a set of perspectives, interests and themes – desire for a freedom or personal happiness that sometimes clashed with tradition or responsibility, quests to fit into new surroundings and master new situations while remaining true to one’s self – that spoke to Thais and Tamils as much as Irish- or Italian-Americans.

A similar phenomenon – deep experience with diversity, embodied in the very biographies of key moviemakers – aids Indonesian cinema’s broad appeal. Like Hollywood, people from ethnic minorities have been disproportionately prominent in Indonesia’s film industry – decades ago it was heavily Chinese Indonesians, now it’s often Indian Indonesians. The country’s most-lauded director, Hanung Bramantyo, has a Chinese mother, and a father and grandfather prominent in Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah. Bramantyo has made films with overtly Islamic subject matter. He has made films lauding Indonesia’s pluralism. Above all he has consistently made popular films.

In Jakarta I often find myself wanting to hear from American voices. America is an immigrant nation, a fusion of different cultures; America has long been in the vanguard of modernity, progress and freedom but is now facing down an unprecedented challenge to those values. In other words, America has in abundance the raw material to produce human stories, intelligent yet accessible, avoiding political polemics but speaking to the core concerns of the age, which would be of acute interest and relevance to people in diverse, aspirational, modernising yet culturally-torn societies everywhere – Indonesia, the rest of Southeast Asia, and yes, mainland China, too. Amid renascent nationalism and nativism, modern Hollywood could play as pivotal a role as classical Hollywood did in revealing just how many commonalities people of different countries and cultures share. What an opportunity to throw away for superhero franchises.

I sit in Jakarta cinemas and I think: Hollywood might seek inspiration from Indonesian cinema. The best Indonesian film of the past year, and another hit, was Dua Garis Biru, about a teenage girl who becomes pregnant. In one scene, main character Dara is walking aimlessly, upset and confused, when she sees an ondel-ondel, which is a costumed figure wearing long robes and a colourful mask that often walks along Jakarta streets. She stares at it, and it appears to stare back, the mask giving it a Delphic expression. What I took from the scene was Dara’s searching, questioning gaze, her seeing in the masked ondel-ondel something of the world’s mysteriousness and lack of clear-cut answers or resolutions. A simple scene, no CGI necessary: an Indonesian schoolgirl on a Jakarta street appraising a highly-localised old custom. And a scene which leaps effortlessly over cultural, national and language divides. Here in Indonesian cinema is a universe more appealing than Marvel’s: ours.