Power Ballad

John Carney made Once and Sing Street and Flora and Son. Three films about music and longing and people who are better at expressing themselves through songs than through words. Power Ballad is his fourth film in that same world. It is nice. It is warm. It is not quite as good as what came before it.

Rick is an American wedding singer who has been living in Dublin for fifteen years, giving up his dream of musical stardom after marrying his Irish girlfriend and having a daughter. One night at a castle wedding he meets Danny Wilson, a fading boy-band star trying to relaunch his career. They bond. Rick plays him a song he wrote. Danny takes that song to LA and turns it into the biggest hit of the year.

What follows is a film about credit and ambition and what you are willing to risk for recognition. That is a good premise. Carney handles it warmly and with his usual lightness. The Dublin setting is beautiful. Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd, which is to say entirely likeable and impossible to dislike.

Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas

Rudd is the reason to watch this film. He plays Rick with the specific quality of a man who has made peace with his life without fully making peace with his dreams, and that tension sits quietly under everything he does in the film. He is not performing regret, he is living alongside it, and that is a much harder thing to do on screen. Nick Jonas as Danny is more of a surprise than expected. He is better here than his filmography would suggest, finding a specific kind of charming shallowness that makes the character work.

Carney's Previous Film Was Better

Flora and Son was a sharper, tighter, more emotionally precise film than Power Ballad. It had a rawness to it, a willingness to let its characters be genuinely messy and difficult, that made the musical moments land with real weight. Power Ballad is softer. The conflict at its center, Rick wanting credit for his song, is real but the film never lets it get properly ugly. Everyone is too likeable. The middle section sags into a slapstick subplot that feels borrowed from a different film entirely and does not belong here.

Carney is at his best when he trusts the music and the quiet moments between people. When Power Ballad does that it is genuinely lovely. When it tries to be broader and funnier and more commercially accessible, it loses what makes his films special.

Still Worth Watching

None of this makes Power Ballad a bad film. It is a good film with a great director operating slightly below his best. The music is good. The Dublin photography is gorgeous. Rudd carries it effortlessly. There is enough heart here to make the ending land. It is the kind of film that will make you feel good walking out of it, which is not nothing.