"Power Ballad" Review

 Irish director John Carney occupies a very specific niche making movies about musicians that never really feel realistic. Best known for 2007's Once, whose signature song "Falling Slowly" won the Best Original Song Oscar and catapulted the Swell Season into NPR fame. Subsequently, 2016's Sing Street about a high school band in Dublin garnered a Golden Globe nomination. While I scored it a 6/10, the never-written review was going to call out the insanity of a band in Dublin in 1985 not being fans of U2 which would be like making a movie about a soul singer in 1960s Detroit without mentioning Motown.

Carney's latest is Power Ballad, a slight dramedy starring Paul Rudd as Rick Power (get it?), an American who gave up his fleeting chance at rock fame years before to settle down with his wife and teenage daughter in Ireland. While playing a wedding gig at a castle with his band The Bride & the Groove (punny) where an old friend of the couple of honor is former boy band star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas of Jonas Brothers boy band fame). They ask the band if Danny could sit in for a tune and they rock out Stevie Wonder's "I Wish." (Also famous for being the main loop for Will Smith's Wild Wild West theme.) Video of the jam goes viral.

After the festivities wind down Rick strolls the grounds of the castle and encounters Danny who invites him into his suite which is loaded with recording equipment and instruments. The pair spend the evening hanging out and playing songs while drinking and smoking. One of the songs Rick plays is called "How to Write a Song (Without You)" which lacks a bridge, but has verses and a chorus. In the morning, as the band is heading home, a worker from the castle brings Rick a guitar case with a $6300 Gibson J-200 acoustic with a thank you note for the jam session.

We then see Danny's life with a huge mansion that is very beautiful, but sterile and cold-feeling compared to Rick's small and cluttered home in Ireland. His label and manager, Mac (Jack Reynor, Sing Street), feel his latest tunes are generic and his career expiration date approaches. Struggling, he plays "How to Write a Song (Without You)" and his girlfriend, Marcia (Havana Rose Liu), overhears him and tells him it's great and he should record it.

Six months later, Rick is at the mall and overhears a very familiar melody wafting from the mall's sound system. He hunts it down and discovers Danny has finished the song, released it as his, and his having a career Renaissance as a result as the song tops the charts, gets awards nominations, and gets Danny playing arenas. Rick struggles to contact Mac who blows him off especially when Rick admits he can't prove he wrote the song with any demos or performances anyone can vouch for.

Even his wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett) and daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon), doubt him and combined with guests at weddings asking for the Danny's song to be played, Rick spirals, wrecks the van which his family in it and gets fired from the band. After Rachel kicks him out, he ends up at the door of Sandy (Peter McDonald, who also co-write the movie with Carney), the band's guitarist with a not-great idea: Fly to Los Angeles and confront Danny at his concert. This and the pair's crashing of the afterparty at Danny's mansion goes pretty much as expected.

As he approaches 60 years of age, Rudd if finally looking like he's in his forties. He's charming and funny as usual, but also presents Rick's undercurrent of resentment at having traded music for family only to have his song stolen to elevate another whom he only showed fellowship to. Jonas is OK as well, though he's got the heel role as someone who steals another writer's work, but while he clearly feeling guilty, his desire to get back on top trumps his guilt.

For someone who loves semi-musical stories, he simply can't get the sonics right. It was especially bad in Sing Street as the band of novice high schoolers sounded like a slickly polished studio recording when they played and it's the same here for the wedding band. It's not impossible to get the vibe right - Light of Day and especially Breaking Glass nailed the live dive bar sonics - but Carney clearly doesn't care. Danny's arena performance is also staged weirdly with the stage way to tall for an arena (it's more stadium sized) with no stage design, video wall backdrop, etc. It looks like a rehearsal stage, not a full fat concert by a Big Star.

Having the movie end with a drunken, depressed Rick killing himself was unexpected.....KIDDING!!! JUST KIDDING!!! The movie wraps up succinctly with justice done and shown by inference instead of explicitly which denies the viewer some satisfaction in Danny getting his comeuppance, but overall Power Ballad manages to hum a passably entertaining story tune. 

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.