There is a particular cruelty in hearing your own song played back to you by someone else. Not a cover version, not an interpolation, but the song itself – the melody you hummed into existence at two in the morning, the lyric you wrote for your daughter when she was two – blasted across a Dublin shopping centre with a stranger’s name attached. This is the premise at the centre of Power Ballad, John Carney’s ninth feature film and his most commercially minded work to date. It is also, depending on your perspective, either his most mature engagement with the music industry or his most calculated.
The Wedding Singer and the Boyband Ghost
Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, an American musician who washed up in Dublin fifteen years ago after a girl, a marriage, and a daughter kept him rooted. He fronted a band called Octagon. He had a record deal. He toured. Now he sings “Summer of ’69” and “The Power of Love” at wedding receptions with his group, the Bride and Groove, and pretends this was always the plan. Nick Jonas plays Danny Wilson – yes, named after the Scottish pop outfit whose 1987 hit “Mary’s Prayer” was written by Gary Clark, the songwriter who provides Power Ballad‘s original music alongside Carney himself. Danny is a former boyband star attempting a solo comeback. He needs a hit. He is running out of time.
The two men meet at a castle wedding outside Dublin. Danny is a surprise guest; Rick’s band is providing the entertainment. After a rousing collective rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” – a scene that plays like a proof of concept for Rudd’s singing credentials – they end up in Danny’s hotel suite, drinking Scotch and playing each other unfinished songs. Rick plays a ballad he has been tinkering with for years. He cannot find the bridge. Danny listens. They part as friends. Months later, Rick hears his song on the radio. It is number one. Danny Wilson is back. And Rick Power has no proof he wrote it.
Dublin as Character, Again
Carney has always treated Dublin the way Woody Allen treated Manhattan or Richard Linklater treats Austin – as a living, breathing collaborator. Once wandered Grafton Street and the back lanes of Temple Bar. Sing Street turned the grey brutalism of Synge Street CBS into a launching pad for teenage rebellion. Flora and Son traced the city’s inner-city housing estates with a single mother’s restless energy. As we explored in our analysis of Carney’s visual storytelling, his films treat cities as characters in their own right. Power Ballad follows suit, though the geography has shifted. Rick lives in Crumlin. He shops at Dundrum Town Centre. He walks past the Tourist Information Centre with a guitar on his back, a man whose American accent marks him as permanently foreign in the city he has chosen as home.
The Dublin here is not postcard Dublin. It is the Dublin of working musicians – the wedding venues in leafy south County Dublin, the suburban streets where families live in the quiet aftermath of deferred dreams. When the film relocates briefly to Los Angeles for its third act, the contrast is instructive. Danny’s Hollywood mansion, with its security gates and recording studio, represents everything Rick once wanted and chose not to pursue. The film does not moralise about this choice. It simply holds the two worlds in tension and asks which one constitutes a life well lived.
The Song That Had to Work
Every Carney film rests on a single musical conceit: can the song carry the drama? Once had “Falling Slowly,” which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a Tony-winning Broadway musical. Sing Street had “Drive It Like You Stole It,” which was robbed of an Oscar nomination and has since achieved the cult status that matters more than awards. Power Ballad places its bets on “How to Write a Song Without You,” a slow-building power ballad written by Clark and Carney that functions as the film’s load-bearing mechanism.
The song is deliberately uncool. It is earnest. It is the kind of thing a wedding singer might write for his daughter and then never finish because finishing it would mean admitting it is finished – and what comes after that? Clark, who fronted the band Danny Wilson in the 1980s before becoming one of the UK’s most reliable pop craftsmen (Natalie Imbruglia, Demi Lovato, McFly), understands the architecture of a hook. “How to Write a Song Without You” has a chorus that lodges itself in the brain and refuses to leave. It is heard at least a dozen times across the film’s ninety-eight minutes, in varying lengths and contexts – as a whispered fragment, as a stadium anthem, as a lullaby. By the time Rudd’s character’s daughter hears it on the radio and sings along, the song has become something more than a plot device. It has become the question the film is asking: who does a song belong to once it leaves the room where it was made?
Rudd and Jonas: The Unlikely Duet
The casting of Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas is the film’s most inspired and most precarious gamble. Rudd, fifty-seven, has spent three decades as Hollywood’s most ageless comedic presence – from Clueless to Ant-Man, from Anchorman to Only Murders in the Building. He is not a singer. He has never pretended to be. The weeks before filming, he admits, were filled with the kind of terror that comes from attempting something genuinely outside your competence. “I’m always just like, ‘Oh God, I hope I don’t fall on my face,'” Rudd told People magazine. “But I feel that with just about every job I do. It’s more of just, ‘I hope it’s believable.'”
He is believable. Rudd plays guitar and sings throughout the film with a weariness that suits the character – a man whose voice has been used for other people’s celebrations rather than his own expression. Jonas, by contrast, plays against type with surprising effectiveness. As Danny Wilson, he is charming and opaque, generous in the jam session and evasive when confronted. “I’ve lived a lot of these experiences,” Jonas told ABC Audio. “And not just the career stuff and the fame aspect of Danny’s life, but the songwriting and the journey to find yourself, push the envelope, do something different, the pressure that you can feel.” Carney chose Jonas precisely because he is a real musician – “He just has stood on so many stages in the world. He walks onto a stage and he just is natural, he knows how it works” – and the film benefits from the authenticity this brings to the performance sequences.
Peter McDonald, who co-wrote the screenplay with Carney and plays Rick’s loyal bandmate Sandy, provides the film’s comic ballast. Jack Reynor, a Carney regular since Sing Street, is effective as Danny’s hard-nosed manager Mac, the man who tells the pop star that without a hit he faces a future of “eating live bugs on reality TV or joining a nostalgia tour.” Havana Rose Liu is underused as Danny’s girlfriend Marcia, and the film’s Los Angeles sequences lack the texture of its Dublin scenes, but these are minor complaints in a film that moves with the confidence of a well-rehearsed setlist.
Authorship in the Age of AI
What elevates Power Ballad above a standard music-industry dramedy is its engagement with questions that extend far beyond the plot. Nick Jonas identified the core issue in a recent interview: “What fascinated me about this film is that it asks a very timely question: What does ownership of an idea actually mean today?” In an era of AI-generated content, streaming royalties that favour platforms over artists, and a culture that increasingly treats creativity as raw material to be extracted and repackaged, the film’s central conflict – a wedding singer who wrote a song and a pop star who stole it – feels less like a dramatic contrivance than a distillation of how the music industry actually operates. The parallels with how Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour redefined the economics of live music are striking: both stories reveal an industry in which the artist’s relationship to their own work is perpetually renegotiated.
Carney, a former bassist for the Frames (1991–1993), has always made films about the gap between artistic aspiration and commercial reality. Once was about two buskers who could barely afford to record. Begin Again explored a disgraced label executive and a songwriter learning to reconnect with what drove them to create. Sing Street was about teenagers discovering that making music could be a form of escape. Power Ballad pushes this inquiry into more uncomfortable territory. It asks whether a hit song is a gift or a theft, whether collaboration implies consent, and whether the person who finishes a song has more claim to it than the person who started it. The film does not answer these questions definitively. It is too honest for that. But it asks them with enough specificity to matter.
The Carney Formula, Refined
John Carney has a formula. He knows it. Critics know it. The audience, at this point, either loves it or does not. He makes musical films set in Dublin (or occasionally New York) in which songs emerge naturally from character rather than spectacle, in which working musicians struggle with the gap between art and commerce, and in which a single song can change everything. The films are warm, human, and honest. They are also, as the Seattle Times noted in its somewhat cooler review of Power Ballad, “not always particularly challenging, but warm, catchy easy listening, like a great pop song.”
The question with any Carney film is whether the formula has run its course. Power Answered suggests not. The film holds an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes across 84 reviews, with the consensus that “Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas prove to be harmonious screen partners in Power Ballad, a mellow dramedy that acknowledges the allure and pitfalls of stardom with equal measures of grace.” The Guardian gave it four out of five stars. Variety called it “a winning pop drama.” Little White Lies praised its “emotional generosity” while noting that “tonally it’s a little all over the place.” The Irish Times, characteristically measured, acknowledged the film’s “charmingly ingenuous belief in pop music as something that truly matters.”
This belief is Carney’s greatest asset and his most predictable one. He has been making the same film for nearly twenty years, and each iteration refines a slightly different aspect of the same question: what does music mean to the people who make it? Power Ballad answers this question by situating it within the machinery of the modern music industry – the streaming numbers, the label politics, the Instagram posts that matter more than the songs themselves. It is Carney’s most commercially minded film, produced by Lionsgate with a budget that dwarfs the £100,000 he spent on Once, and it shows in the scale of the production design, the polish of the live concert sequences, and the presence of two genuine movie stars. Whether this represents a compromise or an evolution depends on where you stand.
The Final Chord
Power Ballad is not Carney’s best film. Once remains untouchable, a minor miracle of low-budget filmmaking that captured something true about the way songs are born. Sing Street is more consistently joyful, a teenage fantasy that earns every one of its emotional beats. But Power Ballad is a good film – occasionally a very good one – that does what Carney’s films have always done best: it makes you care about a song. It makes you care about the person who wrote it. And it leaves you with a question that lingers long after the credits roll, a question about authorship and honesty and the price of getting everything you ever wanted.
Rudd, who received a Volta Award at the Dublin International Film Festival for his contribution to cinema, put it simply at the premiere: “With John’s films, they’re all love letters and they make you feel good.” This is true. Power Ballad is a love letter – to Dublin, to music, to the stubborn belief that a song can still mean something in a world that has largely stopped listening. Whether the letter arrives intact is another matter. But the writing, as always with Carney, is worth reading.
