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Nick Jonas, left, and Paul Rudd star in Power Ballad.David Cleary/The Associated Press
Power Ballad
Directed by John Carney
Written by John Carney and Peter McDonald
Starring Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas and Jack Reynor
Classification 14A; 98 minutes
Opens in theatres June 5
John Carney captured lightning in a bottle nearly two decades ago with Once. The writer and director’s scrappy and sweeping kitchen-sink musical starred Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová as soulful, down-on-their-luck musicians who find a genuine spark, both romantic and creative, when jamming together in drab and dreary Dublin. Carney, a musician himself, has been chasing that high ever since, repeating his formula, building crowd-pleasers such as Begin Again and Sing Street around songwriting collaborations, with bigger stars and varying degrees of success.
What to watch this weekend: Another fun and easy Mindy Kaling rom-com, plus thriller Cape Fear
I bring up Once because Carney seems to be responding to it or at least acknowledging how far he’s gotten away from the spirit and sentiment of it with his latest musical, Power Ballad. Paul Rudd stars as wedding singer Rick Power, who runs around claiming pop star Danny Hill (Nick Jonas) stole his song. You see, they had an impromptu jam session, fuelled by the whisky and weed. But Rick and Danny’s songwriting session doesn’t have that spark we usually see in Carney’s films, giving us the sense that these musicians are connecting on a profound level or that music can help them transcend their circumstances.
It leads instead to theft and a narrative that flirts with a more cynical view of an industry Carney loves to make movies about, in which artistry and authorship are minimized while algorithms and AI gain new ground.
Clocking how much has changed since Once, Carney even recycles a scene from the earlier film. A busker dressed much like Glen Hansard’s gets robbed for the change in his guitar case. This time, the busker doesn’t give chase. He just shrugs, defeated.
It’s an amusing moment, one of many. But I found myself wishing Carney would say more with that shrug, about the industry or his own artistry. But there’s nothing so genuine in Power Ballad, nothing that can truly be felt or met with anything beyond a shrug. Power Ballad’s just a cute pivot for Carney, who spins cynicism around what the music industry is today into yet another crowd-pleaser, a lightweight Richard Curtis-grade comedy as superficial as the generic pop tunes the movie gently criticizes.
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Jonas, left, plays Danny, a boyband survivor struggling to launch his solo career.David Cleary/The Associated Press
Is it any surprise we’re not mining for soul and depth in a musical co-starring Nick Jonas? I’ll hand it to the Jonas Brother. He puts in the effort to make Danny endearing and empathetic. But Jonas’s limited acting ability is no match for the movie’s sentiments, which are stacked against everything he represents. Danny is a pathetic version of Jonas himself, a boy-band survivor struggling to launch his solo career, trying to show the world there’s more to him than what the tabloids suggest. Danny’s manager, played with perfectly tailored arrogance by Carney regular Jack Reynor, warns that his career has sunk to the point he could be eating live bugs on reality TV. Danny’s in desperate need of a hit single, so he steals a hook from that wedding singer he met in Dublin and turns it into a ballad appropriately called How To Write A Song.
Simply sharing songwriting credit would leave Carney without a movie and us without the opportunity to see Rudd plying his warm and durable shaggy-dog charms while rocking out to Stevie Wonder’s I Wish. Rick fronts a wedding band called the Bride and the Groove. They’re “human jukeboxes” according to a bandmate, performing Kool & the Gang on demand, while Rick’s mind regularly wanders to the dreams that got away from him. He was once on his way to rock stardom but then chose to settle down with a wife and kid in Ireland.
I would have loved to see more of the father-daughter story between Rudd and newcomer Beth Fallon. The latter is wonderful as Aja, a cheeky, sharp and skeptical teen. Her precious few moments eclipse anything else the movie has to offer, as it leans more broadly toward comedy while Rudd’s bitter singer spirals out, chasing Danny for credit while watching his ballad get popular without him.
Power Balled leaves a character like Aja sidelined, only to be used as an easy emotional crutch late in the game, when the movie realizes there isn’t a relationship here we actually care about. Instead Carney just gives us people to laugh at, tap our feet to and then shrug off.
