Irish filmmaker John Carney shot to prominence in 2007, when his romantic musical drama ‘Once’ became an unexpected hit. What had started as a little film that cost just $150,000 to make ended up grossing over $23m at the global box office, won an Academy Award for Best Original song, and was later remade into a stage musical. The warmth shone through the end product to make a connection with the audiences beyond anything that Carney could have ever dreamed of.
Since then, he has focused a lot of his directorial output on the musical genre. These have been fairly consistent in their quality despite varying box office returns. First there was 2013’s Begin Again, a saccharine effort starring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo. Then in 2016 he helmed Sing Street, an Irish-set bittersweet musical that again outperformed expectations. Finally, Flora and Son, a Gary Clark collaboration, performed poorly with a limited release in 2023 before moderate success when it arrived on Apple TV+.
And so we come to Power Ballad, his latest musical comedy. This time, Paul Rudd takes centre stage as Rick Power, the front man of a jobbing wedding band called The Bride and Groove. We are introduced to the band in the middle of a very successful performance at a wedding party, which goes awry when Rick decides to use his formerly successful rock band’s biggest hit as the encore. Inevitably the audience doesn’t dig the sound and the show falls flat. This is a great springboard for his story – he has made a compromise on his personal success by fully committing to family life with his wife and daughter, but is still writing songs with no platform to showcase them.
We are then introduced to Danny Wilson, played by Nick Jonas. He is a struggling former boyband member that is looking to write a hit comeback single. When a chance meeting between him and Rick leads to them jamming out a few song ideas, Nick takes one of Rick’s songs and uses it as the lead single on his new album. The catch? Rick didn’t give him permission and he isn’t credited on the song.
As a member of a very unserious dad rock band who had flashes of musical success in my youth, a lot of the film resonated hard with me. John Carney is a talented songwriter himself, and he is uniquely adept at showing the songwriting process in a realistic manner. I really enjoyed Paul Rudd’s performance in the lead role, which is both lightly humorous and soaked with emotional baggage too.
As a piece of cinema, I have only one small gripe with Power Ballad. The whole film hinges on the magic of one single song as it becomes the most popular piece of music in the entire world. Unfortunately, the song itself is not quite of that quality. It’s not a bad song by any means, but it does have an unlikely callback to another recent musical comedy: K-Pop Demon Hunters. When you watch that film and the same snowballing success happens with ‘Golden’, it’s believable because that song is pop perfection. ‘How To Write A Song (Without You)’ isn’t really hitting that level, and it undermines the entire plot.
Frustratingly, the song that does hit that mark from a previous John Carney film is ‘Falling Slowly’. We do briefly see a busker belting it out in central Dublin, giving us a glimpse of what could have been if that song had been used in this film.
Overall, despite a few limitations, this is a very good film. If you want a bit of uplifting musical comedy in your life, then this is the film for you.
Cinema, etc. 