I’m telling you that this latest John Carney film — easily his best since Once — indisputably works and I mean in a naturally behaved, wholly believable, occasionally subtle, well-written and finely-calibrated way. It never feels slick or “theatrical” or tonally off-balance or over-cranked. I went into yesterday afternoon’s AMC Lincoln Square screening with a “show me” attitude, and I was won over less than 20 minutes into Act One. Hell, earlier than that.
Carney is generally loved for his spirit-vibey, music-themed dramas (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son); his films always leave audiences soothed or at least sated. But Carney is primarily a hard-working, highly skilled filmmaker par excellence — skilled at pacing, at getting his actors to deliver in a fashion that feels honest and true, at natural-sounding dialogue, at plot construction, at peeling off this and that layer of a story in just the right way.
Boiled down I believed each and every aspect of Power Ballad…every character shading, every modest revelation, every line and performance. When a confection-type drama advances and unfurls in just the right way, as Power Ballad does, it settles you down while flipping on a relax-and-enjoy switch. I was waiting for something to go wrong or for a bit or a scene feel like it was somehow mishandled, and disappointment never arrived. And it ends not just happily, but in an emotionally satisfying, un-forced, non-sappy way.
Power Ballad is basically a two-hander — a story about the elusive butterfly of song-writing inspiration**, the every-present seductions of big-time money and fame, and what feelings of disappointment and desperation can do to frustrated or insecure musicians.
Plot-wise Power Ballad is about a kind of rivalry between performers who are 20 years apart but engulfed in a vaguely similar career dynamic — Paul Rudd‘s Rick Power, a 50ish American wedding-band performer, happily married and Emerald Isle-residing, whose rock-star career kinda started to happen in the ’90s but then ran out of gas, and Nick Jonas‘s Danny Wilson, a former boy-band star (as in the real-world Jonas Brothers of the aughts) who, though wealthy and hanging in there, is worried about his ability to succeed as a solo act in the big-time realm.
You’ve no doubt read that Power Ballad is about Danny and Rick jamming together after a lavish Irish wedding, and then Danny stealing Rick’s unproduced love song, “How To Write A Song (Without You)” — a tune that Rick wrote 13 or 14 years earlier but never recorded or even has a digital demo of. Danny adds a bridge and records the tune in exactly the right Richard Perry way, and a few months later it’s become a number one hit. Danny is suddenly recharged and back in the groove, but Rick, after randomly hearing the track in a shopping mall, is enraged and wants some kind of revenge or payback.
Danny’s conveyance of guilt and inner conflict is fascinating. He never quite lets it out in so many words, but when Rick finally confronts him in the third act — at a lavish, Los Angeles birthday party at his own hillside home — he defensive, half-assedly admits that he plagiarized the song, but at the same time emphasizes that it never would have become a hit unless he’d given it a power-pop makeover with a well-crafted bridge. Which he’s probably right about. (Jonathan Shields made the same point about Fred Amiel‘s script of The Far Away Mountain.)
I’d just re-watched Rudd’s performance in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, which was shot 14 years ago, and here he is again in more or less the same same spiritual and physical shape.
And what a coincidence that Marcia, Danny’s girlfriend, is played by Havana Rose Liu, who plays the female lead in Tuner, which I saw three or four hours before Power Ballad at the same plex.
I really do believe that the critics who’ve pissed on this film have exposed themselves as…I don’t know, pinched or screwed up or emotionally malignant on some level. Los Angeles Times staffer Amy Nicholson, UPI’s Fred Topel, Fresh Fiction’s Courtney Howard.. These people have urine running through their veins.
My approving view of Power Ballad is not, like, “an opinion, man”, mind. I know when I’ve seen a film that’s been assembled with charm, humanity, skill, confidence and assurance. This is not something to be debated. I know this.
** how a good song doesn’t necessarily become a hit unless it’s been recorded and produced in just the right way, and with just the right mood and dynamic.