Features / The Weekend Stream

Ahead of our usual Weekend Stream coverage, Mike takes a look at a new soundtrack to a very special film that starts its theatrical run today: Power Ballad, from writer/director John Carney. The film is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, expanding to wider release next Friday, June 5.

Some of the best filmmakers make a mark by turning variations on a theme around and around, like the rotation of a record player. John Ford mythologized the American West; Alfred Hitchock dialed into anxiety and suspense like no other; Steven Spielberg loves childlike wonder and spiritual triumph; Martin Scorsese explores Catholic guilt and dark-hearted corruption. While not considered as prolific an auteur as those men, John Carney, the Irish writer/director, has a treasured theme all his own: music – the ways it can profoundly change you even on a small scale, and how it can heal the wounds and soothe the scars of yearning, broken people.

Consider his breakthrough works after formative time spent in a band (playing bass for Irish rockers The Frames) and toiling in local film and TV projects. 2006’s Once featured bandmate Glen Hansard and Czech singer/songwriter Markéta Irglová as buskers in Dublin whose lives become intertwined. (Upon viewing it, Spielberg said the film “gave me enough inspiration to last the rest of the year.”) The low-budget film earned an Oscar for the duo’s heartrending “Falling Slowly.” 2013’s Begin Again showcased two characters chewed up by the vagaries of the record industry (Mark Ruffalo as a label executive, Keira Knightley as a singer/songwriter) learning to reconnect with what drove them to create. It too featured an acclaimed song, the Oscar-nominated “Lost Stars” – co-written by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander and his longtime friend and collaborator Danielle Brisebois.

It was 2016’s Sing Street that took Carney to another level of musical storytelling. Drawing from his own experience at a state school in ’80s Dublin, the film showcases a group of misfits who decide to start a band and revive their young spirits in a time of Troubles. Here, Carney collaborated with Danny Wilson frontman Gary Clark on a song score that captured the magic of starting a rock group: tunes indebted to MTV stars, but with a growing panache all their own. Clark knew there was something special about the film. “When it first came out, it didn’t do too well at the box office…John sounded really disappointed on a phone call one day.,” he told me in an interview last year. “And I said to him, ‘I don’t know, John. I’ve got a feeling about this film, that it’s just gonna be one of those things that people are gonna share with their friends.'”

How right he was: the film maintains a devoted cult following and was even adapted for the stage by the creative team. (A Broadway run was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic before it could reach previews, but the show was tweaked and made it to London’s West End last year.) More importantly, Clark became Carney’s musical right hand, collaborating on another film – the 2023 dramedy Flora and Son, about a wayward single mother (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter) using the remote lessons of an L.A. guitar instructor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to find common ground with her teenager – and even the streaming series Modern Love, a two-season anthology inspired by the New York Times column of the same name.

A decade on from Sing Street (with a 10th anniversary vinyl reissue due out this summer), Carney and Clark have teamed up for another modest masterpiece in Power Ballad, a sprightly comedy that takes Carney’s song-savior themes in interesting new directions. In the film, an American ex-pat named Rick Power (Paul Rudd) – a former rock singer who settled down in Dublin to raise a family and now fronts a wedding band – happens to meet an ex-boy band frontman by the name of Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) who’s striving to shatter the lens through which most regard his work. That chance encounter seems to breathe life into both musicians…until Power discovers an errant chorus he played during their all-night jam session has become the foundation for Wilson’s solo breakthrough.

You can kind of imagine the beats that happen next, but the film still manages to surprise you in its execution. Power has no proof that the song is his, and is driven nearly mad by the ubiquity of the tune in ways that play darker than Rudd’s typical affable comedy style. As Wilson, Jonas – hilariously augmented by raw footage of his real tenure in family band The Jonas Brothers – could easily be placed as the film’s villain; instead, he’s a likable musician whose selfish mistake creates ripples you’d expect, and ones you wouldn’t. It builds up to a humorous climax that sneakily flips into sentimentality that can freeze time and show audiences the magic, once more, of a song mending broken hearts.

What makes this work, of course, is the song itself: “How to Write a Song Without You,” a tender ballad that anchors the film and its soundtrack. Written by Clark and Wilson, it plays like a strange mix of Danny Wilson, The Jonas Brothers, a sentimental pop juggernaut like Ed Sheeran, and even a hint of sturdiness that reminds one of Richard Marx at his commercial peak. In an era of hyped-up chart placements juiced up by streaming numbers, viewers may certainly debate if “How to Write” would really be a hit today. What I can tell you is, to these ears, it is extremely effective. Not since the title track of Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do! has a song been such a load-bearing mechanism for a film. It quickly gearshifts from pleasantry to full-bore earworm as the film progresses, heard at least a dozen times in varying lengths and contexts. As simple as it may be, compositionally, it has an uncanny ability to channel and reflect the feelings of the film’s narrative, taking on wearying, even sinister qualities as well as spiritual catharsis. (If you’re a certain type of sentimentalist, the song’s final use – fueled with a key revelation in the film – will wreck you. It certainly did me!) “How to Write a Song Without You” is no mere Diane Warren-style end-credit banger. Like “Falling Slowly” or “Lost Stars,” it must be taken seriously as a contender for a Best Original Song Academy Award. To sustain attention and momentum at length of a feature film, then becoming a song that won’t soon escape your head, is a thing of beauty and power indeed.

The song is present in three versions on the soundtrack: its in-film single version, an alternate recording by Jonas and a heartfelt read by Rudd himself. (Rudd acquits himself well in the film and is the arguable star of the soundtrack, leading seven covers of ’70s and ’80s wedding band covers and three Clark originals. (Two represent his soft rock past onscreen, and another scores the end credits as a fine update of a tune from Flora and Son.) Jonas sings another trio of modern songs in character as Danny Wilson, with some surprising vocal turns from Clark in the process. They won’t and aren’t supposed to recall the Scottish pop heroes of the same name, but they are quirky fun that recalls Clark’s second career working with singer/songwriters like Lauren Christy and Natalie Imbruglia. (Danny Wilson the band’s biggest hit “Mary’s Prayer” makes a cameo in one scene of the film, as does another classic from Carney’s filmography.)

Like Carney’s other sturdy films, Power Ballad answers another round of “can a song save your life” discourse with a resounding “yes.” As a longtime fan of the filmmaker and the songwriting magic of Gary Clark, I can only too heartily recommend that you experience this film for yourself, ideally with a friend or a loved one. I think a certain song will be playing in your head (and your heart) on the trip home.

The Power Ballad soundtrack is available digitally from Republic Records at Apple or Amazon.