PLOT: A wedding singer (Paul Rudd) based in Ireland sparks an unexpected friendship with a young pop star (Nick Jonas), but to his horror, he discovers that a song he wrote has been stolen by the younger man, who refuses to share credit as it turns into a worldwide phenomenon.
REVIEW: There are very few directors out there whose work I look forward to more than John Carney. I’ve never disliked any of his movies (Flora and Son was a recent delight), and two of them (Once and Sing Street) are among the best movies ever made about music. His latest, Power Ballad, is another gem, anchored by one of star Paul Rudd’s best performances. He also shows off a surprising flair for singing, harkening back to an unheralded early role where he once (very convincingly) played a washed-up rock star on the late, great Veronica Mars.
In Power Ballad, Rudd plays Rick, a gifted singer-songwriter who once fronted a pop band but fell in love with an Irish woman, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), and abandoned his rock star dreams for a quiet life as a family man in Ireland. There, he’s a loving husband who dotes on his daughter Aja (named after the Steely Dan album?), played by Beth Fallon. He even gets to keep playing music, serving as the lead singer for a top-notch wedding band, where he sings (quite well) all the old classics people want to hear.
It’s when he absolutely kills a gig at a high-end wedding that he meets Nick Jonas’s Danny, who was once in a boy band and is now struggling with a solo career. After performing together, the two spend the rest of the night drinking and jamming, but when Rick shares a great song he’s been tinkering with for years with Danny, he doesn’t know what he’s in for.
Power Ballad walks a fine line. In any other movie, Nick Jonas’s Danny would be a villain, callously stealing Rick’s song. But Carney’s movies are more nuanced. While not excusing the act, we see Danny grappling with the notion that his talent isn’t quite as vast as he once thought, and that his career is on the verge of ending if he’s not able to capitalize on his former boy-band fame soon. He deludes himself into thinking what he’s doing isn’t wrong, and Carney never portrays him as wholly unsympathetic. Yet, he also doesn’t excuse how callous Danny becomes once the song is a smash hit, and how he lacks the scruples to admit his wrongdoing, with him easily swayed by his sleazy manager—Carney favorite Jack Reynor as Mac.
Jonas is well cast in a role that demonstrates his singing ability but also a degree of vulnerability, as you never truly hate Danny. Yet it’s a showstopping movie for Paul Rudd, who has one of the best roles of his career as Rick. Rudd is one of the most sympathetic, likeable leading men working, and the fact that he plays Rick as not necessarily vengeful—just bent on getting some kind of acknowledgment—is perfect. But Carney also doesn’t let Rick come off as too idealized, with him succumbing to some bitterness early on when he realizes his song really was good enough to become a phenomenon, but that he’ll never get his moment in the sun. Marcella Plunkett is wonderful as his loyal, loving wife, while Beth Fallon is a find as his daughter.
Best of all, though, is Peter McDonald as Rick’s lifelong sidekick, Sandy, who plays in the wedding band with him and—while a bit of a silly shambles—always has his back. That’s really what you get in a Carney movie: a collection of people who represent the best parts of life rather than the worst. It’s this quality that always makes his movies feel like a breath of fresh air, and the SXSW audience I saw this with ate it up. Hopefully it does well enough that Carney can keep making these movies for a long time—he’s quietly becoming one of the best directors of our era.
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