Cinemacaw: Taking flight through film.

Powerful performances from Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas in this fun film.

Music. Family. Ireland. The movies of John Carney seem to centre on these central themes. Yet despite Power Ballad looking like Carney has made his music, family, Ireland film again, this feels more ambitious – and I think he pulls it off.

Paul Rudd is the centre of this film playing the wonderfully/ridiculously named lead, Rick Power. A washed up exasperated wedding singer, Rick had dreams of making it big before settling small in Ireland with his wife and daughter. When Rick meets ex-boyband singer Danny, played by the insightfully cast Nick Jonas, they chat, they bond, and they ‘jam’. However, once Danny turns one of Rick’s songs into a number one single, Rick aims to get the recognition he deserves.

The casting seems to have propelled this film from your average Sunday afternoon ‘cutesie comfort’ watch into a ‘grab the popcorn’ hit. Casting Nick Jonas as a childhood pop sensation on the precipice of obscurity worked. And although in real life there is no fear Nick Jonas would need to “eat bugs” on live television, his real life fame and background does follow through into his character Danny: as someone trying to prove to the world he’s his own man and not just a member of some bygone boy band. Paul Rudd as Rick Powers worked too. It’s easy for the audience to believe Rick could have been a big star (of course it’s easy – it’s Paul Rudd!), but he also plays exasperated dreamer, embarrassing dad, and jilted jamming partner all too well. The supporting cast are, of course, fantastic too. Peter McDonald as loyal best friend Sandy provided many a laugh and I feel like this wont be the last we see of Beth Fallon who played daughter Aja with a sensitivity and realness that many writers fail to see in Gen-Z characters. Havana Rose Liu (see Cinemacaw’s review of Tuner) was tragically underused, perhaps hinting at a storyline being lost to the cutting room floor. But the film’s genius lies with the two central performances and landing Rudd in the role of Rick elevates this movie into the mainstream.

The film itself hinges on the music. With director John Carney reuniting with musician Gary Clark 10 years after 2016’s Sing Street, we knew the original songs were due to be catchy and uplifting (I still have Sing Street’s ‘Drive it Like You Stole it’ on my running playlist). Gary Clark has done it again and this time with a brilliant knowing glance to Clark’s band also called ‘Danny Wilson’. With Paul Rudd performing a mixture of covers with his band ‘The Bride and Groove’ (seriously whoever was in charge of names in this movie must have been having a field day), as well a good handful of original songs performed by both Rudd and Jonas the film has a lot of musical sequences, and I mean a lot. They’re fun: sure! Catchy: of course! Cheesey: without a doubt! So what is not to love?! Well for me, the egregious amounts of ADR/lipsyncing. It’s hard to get emotionally invested in the performances when they sound so prerecorded; it completely broke the immersion when one minute you have dialogue sounding one way coming out of a microphone and singing from supposedly the same microphone sounding completely different. All of this would be fine – it’s not unusual for even musicals to have prerecorded songs – but for the extended duration of each performance (to give you some idea of the length of these sequences, the duration of the album clocks in at 58 minutes, with the movie being 98 minutes long). It meant for large swathes of the movie I was experiencing the strange cognitive dissonance of ‘this is a performance for a movie’. The film was at its best when the undeniably talented Rudd and Jonas were singing live and I couldn’t help but wish move of the sequences were just that.

It’s a really fun film: it’s unabashed playfulness a perfect antidote to cinema’s more dour offerings. However with a UK BBFC rating of 15 (due to language) it does make me wonder how popular this movie will be in the cinema: potentially alienating younger teen viewers who I can only imagine would have enjoyed this film very much.

Subjective – 3

Objective – 3

Tesni Jones 22/06/26

Image (c) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32267691/mediaviewer/rm4123052290/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk