By the end of Power Ballad I felt like I had been emotionally manipulated all the way up a very familiar garden path. In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I also cried. On balance I’d summarise it as “John Carney does it again”, the writer/director who does other things but regularly returns to the street-musical genre that made his name with 2006’s Once (wow, 20 years ago), and then proved he wasn’t a one-trick pony with Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son.
Do we all like Paul Rudd? Is Rudd the everyman du jour, more handsome, funnier and nicer than we are but adjacent enough that we buy in to whatever he does? He plays Rick, the lead singer in an Irish wedding band who once had a dream to conquer the world with his own music but now settles for a Huey Lewis and the News cover with his bandmates, or a quick go round with AC/DC. This is our guy – his dreams are now dust, the rock lifestyle being incompatible with paying the utilities bills and making sure your daughter has done her homework.
And then Rick meets ex-boybander Danny Wilson, who just happens to be a guest at one of the fancier weddings Rick and band The Bride and Groove (hey!) are doing the music for. Over drinks and weed after the event, Danny spills his guts to Rick on how he yearns to be taken seriously and make music that’s critically rated. Rick plays him a couple of his own songs and Danny likes them. And, hey ho, if one of them doesn’t in short order become a global smash, with Danny taking all the credit for writing it and Rick having no proof that he didn’t.
What’s a boy to do? Get in touch with Danny, now back in LA, or his management, or hire a lawyer, or find some evidence at least that he wrote the song. That’s the film. The old music biz saying, “where there’s a hit there’s a writ” incarnate.
It could so easily have been a terrible handwringer bogging down in legalese but instead this charmer has a light touch. That’s partly down to Rudd, partly Nick Jonas as Danny – Jonas knows whereof he acts, having been in the Jonas brothers. Partly also the songs, by Carney and co-songwriter Gary Clark, who was once the musical mainstay of the band Danny Wilson (so we see what they did there).
Rudd sings and plays the guitar and is good at it, which really helps. He’s a plausible rocker, and since plausibility and authenticity are themes running through this like a virus, that’s important. Can Danny transition from manufactured to real musician? Should Rick be true to his rock calling, or are there more important ways a grown man can live his life, like trying to be a good husband and dad?
There’s grit and feelgood, formula and invention, entertainment and profundity. Carney and co-writer Peter McDonald (who also plays one of Rick’s bandmates, the headbanging Sandy) walk a careful road, keeping it between the hedges (as the Irish say), which is no mean feat.
The whole thing is suffused with a 1990s vibe – right down to the band’s “let’s do this” Reservoir Dogs slo-mo strut at one point – as befits a story about a dude caught on the horns of middle age. Nice supporting turns from Jack Reynor as Danny’s very music-biz manager, and Havana Rose Liu, as Danny’s girlfriend (she was the ballbusting gatekeeper in Lurker, another music-biz movie), and more obviously Marcella Plunkett and Beth Fallon as Rick’s wife and daughter.
Good soundtrack, good original songs, good performances, good story, likeable characters, what more do you want?
Power Ballad – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
