Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas battle it out in John Carney’s Power Ballad, a stolen-song drama that finds its real power in fatherhood.
John Carney built a career on the proposition that a song can rescue two lonely people who happen to find each other. Once, which won an Oscar for “Falling Slowly” on a $160,000 budget is the go-to example. Then Begin Again, Sing Street (probably his best work), and Flora and Son. All of them duets between unlikely partners. He brings that whole toolkit to Power Ballad, plus co-writer Peter McDonald (who also plays the loyal sidekick Sandy). Oh, and don’t forget the warm, unfussy camera of Yaron Orbach.
Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, an American who followed love to Dublin fifteen years ago and now fronts a wedding band called The Bride and Groove. Well past his prime, Rick sneaks his own songs into a setlist of chestnuts while his mates remind him he exists to be a human jukebox. Nick Jonas plays Danny Wilson, a boy-band casualty chasing a solo comeback. They jam one night after an impromptu wedding performance, where Danny happened to be in attendance. They click like soulmates. Then Danny releases Rick’s song months later as his own.
How Power Ballad breaks formula.
In other words, Carney sets up his signature meet-cute — the intimate late-night session, two musicians discovering they speak the same secret language — and lets you settle into the version of the movie you’ve seen him make four times already. Then he detours hard into thornier country. The film stakes out a real argument, the kind most music movies flee, actually. Where does a song actually come from?
After all, Rick supplied the melody and the ache. Danny supplied the production, the bridge, the machine that turned a fragile demo into something 500 million people would stream. Danny gets the movie’s sharpest line — “Do you think it’s easy to turn a song into a hit?” — and the screenplay treats that question as pathetically legitimate rather than purely villainous. The thing belongs to both men, which means it satisfies neither.
The execution mostly honors that ambition, and where it stumbles it stumbles in interesting ways. Yes, the central contrivance asks you to swallow a lot. That two artists bond for the ages and somehow part without exchanging phone numbers, and Rick owns no recording, no witness, no proof beyond his own certainty. Carney clearly knows this and leans into it. He wants Rick stranded, his claim resting entirely on a private truth, which lets the movie become a study of how it feels to know something and watch the world shrug.
Once more, with feeling.
Rudd carries that stranding beautifully right up to the rage, where his bone-deep likability fights the material a little. His descent into a drunken, family-torching spiral asks for a darkness his Ruddy sunshine almost instinctually resists. Jonas, meanwhile, delivers the film’s revelation. He plays Danny as a man who genuinely believes his own self-justifications. He sings like someone who has lived this exact pressure, which he has in real life. The song itself lands as a plausible hit, the rarest thing a movie like this can pull off. It’s no wonder the film repeats it ad nauseam in That Thing You Do! fashion to replicate Rick’s unending torture over its ear-worm status.
And then the ending lifts the whole picture onto its shoulders. Carney holds back his best card until the final part of the film, and sure it’s not as bombastic a music-film ending as, say, Whiplash. But it does approximate the “oh, so the movie is really about this” idea that made Sing Street so triumphant. Side note, wonderful to see Jack Reynor from said film joining Carney once again in a smarmy, music producer role. Less success here to be had for Havana Rose Liu, whom the film unceremoniously drops quite early on.
Once the plagiarism plot finally dissolves, we finally find the real plot underneath it. Power Ballad is really about a man learning to recognize the life he chose as the masterpiece. Not the consolation prize. The closing performance seals it, with a reframing of the song that will be about as emotionally cathartic as Wild Rose.
The bottom line.
Overall, Carney sets a trap baited with his own formula and springs something richer. A film about authorship that turns out to be a film about fatherhood, ambition, and the quiet arithmetic of a good life. The plot logic creaks, yet the songs sing. Jonas surprises with a more nuanced performance than we’ve often seen from the young actor. And the finale earns every tear it reaches for.
Power Ballad is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer below.
Images courtesy of Lionsgate.
REVIEW RATING
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Power Ballad - 8/10
8/10
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
