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Be warned: you will almost certainly leave Power Ballad unable to get the title song and its catchy chorus out of your head. In fact, this cheerful earworm could be the movie’s most memorable element.
That said, there’s always space for an easygoing comedy-drama like this one. Who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours with Paul Rudd in melting-down mode?
Rudd’s Rick Power looks like the ageing rock star he always assumed he’d become, but he actually works as an unabashedly embittered wedding singer. He had a moment, a couple decades back, when he’s sure he could have made it big. Instead, he fell in love, settled down in Dublin with Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), and became a doting parent to Aja (Beth Fallon). He’s happy, at home. But at work… well, every gig feels just like the last, and there’s nothing more depressing than singing other people’s hits.
Or so he assumes, until he meets one-time boy band star Danny (Nick Jonas). As a childhood friend of this week’s groom, Danny turns another faceless job into a thrilling all-night jam session in which he and Rick drunkenly write a song together. They part ways the next morning as friends, and so they remain until Danny releases the song, it becomes a global hit, and he takes full credit. For Rick, the experience is literally maddening. The more he hears the song, the crazier he becomes, until he’s risking the life he’s already got by obsessing over the one he might have had.
This is a crowd-pleasing wedding band of a movie
Director John Carney, who co-wrote the script with Peter McDonald, doesn’t stray far from the modest dreams of his own global smash, the 2006 musical romance Once. But if Power Ballad is too slick to recreate that film’s organic authenticity, it does benefit from the extra polish. Carney, working again with his Sing Street composer Gary Clark, has written a song so catchy, you don’t doubt its success for a second. (It’s called ‘How to Write a Song’, because this is a story that remains stolidly straightforward at every step.) The eternally likeable Rudd knows exactly how to keep us on Rick’s side, while Jonas – playing a secretly desperate pop star to perfection – deftly exposes the heavily-enabled cowardice that sometimes sits at the centre of stardom.
Ultimately, Carney has constructed a crowd-pleasing wedding band of a movie, but a high-quality one, with a strong lead singer and solid backing. And who doesn’t want to celebrate good times? Come on.
In cinemas worldwide Fri May 29.