John Carney’s movies are so earnest, so pleasant, so intent on pushing their puppy-dog sweetness on the audience, that I sometimes start out rolling my eyes and eventually get won over anyway. I’m ground down by their agreeability.
His new movie, Power Ballad, got an eye roll from me right near the top, when I realized that our hero’s last name is Power and, well, he writes a ballad.
Rick Power (Paul Rudd) is an American living in Ireland, who put his rock star dreams on hold when he and his wife had a kid. Now he fronts a wedding cover band, and at a gig, they’re nearly upstaged by one of the wedding guests, a pop star named Danny (Nick Jonas). But Danny is actually a super cool, down-to-earth guy — another eye roll — and he and Rick spend an evening drinking, smoking and jamming together.
Danny’s in a rut. He recently split from a popular boy band and is struggling to find his style as a grown-up solo artist. He has some original songs, but none of them are clicking. Rick can relate. He plays Danny a melody that’s been bouncing around in his head for years, and he’ll likely never crack it.
Cut to six months later. Rick hears that same song coming out of the loudspeakers in a mall. Danny has stolen it, changed some lyrics and turned it into a No. 1 hit. The song becomes so popular that it’s like a tell-tale heart driving Rick mad, and he can’t offer any proof that it’s his.
This is when Power Ballad started to reel me in. Since his 2007 breakout Once, Carney has made increasingly slicker films about the relationship between artistic fulfillment and success. Power Ballad is arguably his most populist movie yet, but like his smaller, scrappier work, it’s about artists struggling with their identities.
What’s interesting about the movie is that it doesn’t really make Danny into a villain. The villain is inauthenticity itself: In Carney’s films, natural, uncultivated talent is at odds with mainstream popularity, and both Rick and Danny are chasing success that’s ultimately empty.
Carney often hangs his films on a single original song that’s supposed to illustrate the effortless genius of his characters: the Oscar-winning “Falling Slowly” in Once, for example, and the irresistible new-wave confection “Drive It Like You Stole It” in Sing Street. The central song in Power Ballad isn’t as good as those, and I’m not sure it could be a chart-topping hit.
Still, the movie communicates an awe for the magic of a catchy tune, and Rudd is the perfect vessel for Carney’s brand of poptimism. He’s one of the most lovable actors around, and even as Rick threatens to blow up his own life to prove a point, there’s never a sense that he won’t be OK in the end.
Carney constructs his movies like the pop songs in them: They’re not challenging, they have an almost mathematical structure, and even if you’re rolling your eyes at its predictability, Power Ballad still manages to end on a note that hits your ears just right.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101 heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.