Directed By John Carney

Starring – Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Peter McDonald

The Plot – When Rick (Rudd), a past-his-prime wedding singer, meets fading boy-band star Danny (Jonas) during a gig, the two bond over music and a late-night jam session. But when Danny turns one of Rick’s songs into the hit that reignites his career, Rick sets out to reclaim the recognition he believes he deserves, even if it means risking everything he cares about.

Rated R for adult language throughout and some drug use

Power Ballad (2026) Official Trailer – Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas

POSITIVES

Since the dawn of the millennium, no director has had a grasp on the world of music quite like John Carney, and with his latest dissecting the unsettling realities of artistic plagiarism, it evokes another insightfully revealing look into the most commercialized industry in the game, offering a trendsetting two-hander between artists at contrastingly unique stages of dissatisfaction in their respective careers. This commonality certainly paves the way for a night of alcoholic-fueled inspiration between them, where Rick’s naive trust is betrayed by Danny’s own impulsive desperation to maintain his spotlight, and while the latter would be the worst kind of antagonistic character in movie helmed by a lesser director, Carney instead illustrates Danny’s inconsiderable choices with an air of self-shame and even momentary regret in slighting someone who single-handedly gave him the biggest smash single of his entire career, and while it keeps the film from reveling in the much-needed dramatics that a story this bland requires to maintain an audience, there’s something artistically refreshing about Carney bonding his characters by their creative vulnerabilities, refusing to categorize them as good versus evil, and instead utilizing each of them to beat to the drum of limitless opportunity that acts swiftly like a thief in the night. Carney’s compulsion for grounded humanity certainly keeps the atmosphere of the engagement uplifting, even at the imbalanced cost of Rick feeling the sting of someone else taking credit for his inspiration, but his scathing discontent towards the music industry offers a nearly-satirical spin on the soulless shell of artist management, particularly alongside these intentionally lifeless C.G music videos and inescapable marketing, the likes of which make the audience and Rick feel more distant from Danny than even before the two met in the first place. The honest truths aren’t exactly groundbreaking, as any movie pertaining to the industry illustrates it as seedily slimy more times than not, however Carney emphatically conveys the obsessive tendencies that studios enact, in order to appraise a toxic urgency to artists who are forced proverbially to shit or get off of the pot, in order to maintain their cultural relevancy, and considering there’s much to learn about Rick’s exploitation that feels like a cautionary tale to those musicians in the audience seeking their own breakthrough success for artistry, it seems evidently clear that Carney is providing an unmistakable condemnation on the state and overnight digestibility of fame, with the director wisely utilizing a real-life musician in Jonas to breed authenticity to the character’s superstar mentality, where the surroundings of these dual protagonists seem to candidly influence the emotional and mature versatility between them. On the subject of Jonas’ casting, the performances from he and Paul Rudd are admittedly a lot of fun in their blossoming bromance, particularly during that aforementioned night of alcoholic inspiration, where the body language and speech patterns of the characters feel so authentic to the late-night inebriation, without them feeling cartoonishly staged or energetically enhanced. After their opening act together, they’re just as meaningful individually, as Rudd’s initially subdued stoicism eventually gives way to a penetratingly familiar kind of vivacity that flourishes during Rick’s telegraphed mental collapse, featuring pocketed moments of internalized anguish to convey the restlessness persisting from within, and though Jonas is essentially portraying an animated version of his own stage persona, there’s a dependable amount of presence that allows him to stand out imposingly amongst those he comes into contact with, where Nick’s artificial humbleness that he brings to the character is compromised transparently during the character’s most defining moments, in turn evoking periodic evidence of this shattered soul from within, without drawing it out to feel melodramatically emphasized compared to any scene of emotionality throughout the movie’s 93-minute runtime. Lastly, like his previous films in Once, Sing Street, or Begin Again, the film’s soundtrack is benefitted greatly with original tracks written specifically for the movie by Carney and his longtime composer, Gary Clark, and though the hit song in question ‘How to Write a Song Without You’ takes center stage in the movie’s relentless repetition of it, the three tracks themselves correspond seamlessly with the kind of music that you would expect to hear from Jonas in real-life, where a lot of musicianship went into such introspective lyrics and melodic instrumentals driving the tracks’ infectiousness. While the songs mostly remain one-note in their mutual emotional impulses, they’re catchy enough to remain a mainstay in the heads of audiences who experience them, with them serving as a much-greater improvement than anything creatively conjured for the songs of Carney’s previous film, Flora and Son.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, while Power Ballad is a serviceably entertaining look into one man’s desire to be justifiably accredited for his artistry, it’s still a noticeably inferior decline of a finished product to the director’s most recent films, particularly as a result of an inconsistently executed screenplay written by Carney that fails to capitalize on pushing the plot to its limits with inevitable confrontation, a hinderance that feels glaringly evident as quickly as the stagnant second act diminishing the momentum attained by a strong opening. After the plot is constructed and enacted by the film’s half hour mark, it fails to progress the storytelling in any meaningful way that could further complicate the conflicts of its characters, especially with Rick’s inability to produce concrete proof of the track being crafted exclusively by him, an unfortunate aspect that leaves his fight for justice immediately dead in the water, as Danny’s fame and the song’s download numbers grow increasingly universal with each passing day. When it finally does progress towards a fully realized in-person conflict, not only has too much time passed on the waning interests of an unfulfilled audience, but it also doesn’t stimulate anything substantially resonating in the evolution of Danny’s distorted morals, leading to an underwhelming resolution that isn’t free of its narrative issues in attaining any semblance of memorability to the finished product. As expected, it’s Rick that grows to see the light of his own erratic actions, alongside a cleansing of clarity that might serve his character rightly, even while it compromises the satisfaction level of the audience’s endearment towards it, and though an evidential resolution surmises itself during the closing minute of the film, it basically happens off-screen, so we never get to experience the kind of redemptive justice that we remained faithfully invested for, an unfortunate aspect that, despite the glaring predictability of this movie’s conflict writing itself and its audience into a proverbial corner, feels every bit tacked-on as it does too late to leave the intended impact. Finally, while the element of comedy is subjective among varying audiences, I found the subtlety of gags from Power Ballad to be lazily enacted by its talented ensemble, especially a vehicle led by one of Hollywood’s most consistent comedic actors driving the movie’s material. While comedy is never the main focus for Carney’s writing, as his slice of life stories typically render themselves subtly to a scene’s primary focus, this is a movie that is labeled as a musical-comedy hybrid, so the idea that that half of its material fails to live up to that intended designation, leaves so many of these unserious scenes feeling like they were crafted without any kind of comedic underlining to accommodate some of the wilder personalities of its ensemble, an overlooked but important aspect that made Sing Street and Begin Again staples of my immense at-home hard copy library.

OVERALL
Power Ballad strikes a chord of industrial cynicism for John Carney’s scathing outlook on the contemporary music scene, providing an insightfully knowledgeable experience of a narrative, but one ultimately suffering in the stagnancy of an explored conflict without any kind of urgency or pay-off to what transpires. While Carney folds under the weight of his most meaningful of moments, he does accomplish a budding bromance between Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, that not only capitalizes on their expansive talents, but also provides corresponding narrative linked by the desperation of creative inspiration, delivering a mid-level offering for Carney that feels like a B-side rather than a hit to add to his prestigious library of musical comedy favorites

My Grade: 6.9 or C+