FILM OF THE WEEK: Power Ballad - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

John Carney has spent much of his career making films about people who love music more than success. The buskers of Once, the teenagers of Sing Street, the struggling artists of Begin Again and Flora and Son all dream of something larger, certainly, but their stories ultimately return to connection, self-expression, community and the simple, transformative pleasure of making something. Power Ballad arrives asking a slightly thornier question: What happens when artistic fulfilment is no longer enough? What happens when the thing you want is recognition?

Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, an American musician who came to Ireland years earlier with dreams of rock stardom and never quite made it. Instead, he built a life – falling in love, starting a family and becoming the frontman of a wedding band, spending his evenings performing at the most significant moments in strangers' lives. It is, in many ways, a deeply meaningful existence. Yet Rick remains haunted by the career that almost happened.
The film's central conflict emerges when, while working at a wedding, Rick meets Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), an American friend of the bride and groom. Danny also happens to be a wildly famous former boy-band star attempting to engineer a comeback. During a late-night jam session after the wedding, Rick plays Danny an unfinished song he has been working on for years. Months later, Danny releases a hit single built around Rick's melody and ideas, presenting it as entirely his own work.

On one level, Power Ballad is a crowd-pleasing comedy about artistic theft, complete with misadventures, chases, caper hijinks and midlife strops. On another, it is a surprisingly sharp meditation on the uncomfortable reality that talent alone rarely determines who succeeds. Rick and Danny are both musicians. They can play. They can perform. Yet one spends his weekends playing weddings in Dublin while the other is propelled to the top of the charts.
The difference has less to do with artistic merit than with youth, timing, visibility, access, and fame. Danny already has the machine, the audience, the marketing apparatus, the industry relationships and the public profile. Rick has the song. That tension gives the film much of its emotional charge. Rick is not merely angry that his work has been taken; he is confronting the possibility that what separated him from success all along was not talent, but luck, support, and power.

Power Ballad also explores the idea that Danny takes more than a melody – he appropriates emotional authenticity itself. Jonas' character is trapped inside an industry obsessed with selling vulnerability while carefully manufacturing it. His stolen comeback single is ironically packaged as a deeply personal confession, complete with music videos filled with tightrope clichés and cringeworthy CGI imagery imitating sincerity while obviously having been focus-grouped within an inch of its inauthentic life.

Yet the film is also smart enough to acknowledge that audiences frequently embrace exactly this kind of performance. The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to Danny's song reflects a culture that endlessly markets authenticity while rewarding polished simulations of it. In this David V. Goliath struggle, Rick’s frustration – which soon becomes obsessive – is understandable. He wants recognition and money, sure – but he also wants an acknowledgement that his work matters, and has made an impact on the world.

The tragedy is that he struggles to recognise the value of what he already has because he remains fixated on the life that never arrived. In contrast, Danny has the mansion, the fame, and the adoration. Yet he appears incapable of producing the kind of emotional depth his audience wants from him. That tension gives the film its melancholy undertow – neither man is satisfied with the riches they each possess.

Meanwhile, in Power Ballad, Dublin looks terrific. John Carney continues to shoot the city with genuine affection, finding warmth and texture in familiar locations without turning them into postcards.

But amid the fun and the laughter, there is a wistful message: that the people who seem to have won the game frequently turn out to be every bit as lost as those still waiting for their chance.

Directed by John Carney. Written by John Carney and Peter McDonald. Edited by Stephen O’Connell. Cinematography by Yaron Orbach.
Starring Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Jack Reynor, Havana Rose Liu, Marcella Plunkett, Beth Fallon, Peter McDonald. 98 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: