Audio By Carbonatix
Form and feeling set modern morality to music.
Paul Rudd’s Rick Power, an American expatriate musician playing gigs in Dublin, Ireland, as the lead singer of a wedding band named The Bride and the Groove, gets cheated by American pop star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) in Power Ballad, a musical comedy with a very modern theme: plebe vs. celebrity power struggle. Danny befriended Rick during an after-wedding booze-and-pot revel, then stole one of his original tunes for his next big hit. The chart-climbing betrayal is shown through what used to be known as a Vorkapich montage of success, growth, and progress (innovated by Slavko Vorkapich and utilized as a classic Hollywood narrative trope in the Thirties and Forties) — a precursor of the fast-paced patchwork now familiar as social media supercuts.
Director John Carney uses the Vorkapich technique (typically updated in clips where pols and TV announcers parrot the same partisan talking points) to demonstrate our current ethical dilemma. Rick learns what it means to have his personal expression stolen and exploited for someone else’s aggrandizement. Carney finds poignancy in Rick’s effort to get Danny to acknowledge the truth — that purloining the hit song “How Can I Write a Song (Without You)” constituted a breach of decency and justice.
In Power Ballad (titled for that dramatic, mid-tempo tune expressing emotional sincerity), Carney celebrates the workaday world of music makers, similar to last year’s Song Sung Blue. (Rick’s bandmates remind him, “We’re not rock stars, we’re human juke boxes” as they perform a set list of other people’s irresistible hits — “Celebration, “Summer of ’69,” “The Power of Love,” “The Boys are Back in Town,” “I Wish,” “Message in a Bottle” — that drive home the universality of pop music.) But then Carney stumbles on unexpected moments that distill Rick’s lessons in hard-luck and perseverance against discouragement and indifference. It happens in three extraordinary close-ups.
In one, Rick’s teenage daughter Aja (Beth Fallon) distrusts her father’s insistence that his creativity was stolen. Asked about her personal interests, she gives a perfect Taylor Swiftie reply: “Revenge.” It fits her pudgy-faced, prepubescent look of an unformed soul brainwashed by trendy internet fodder such as what the Vorkapich success montage conveyed.
In another close-up, we see Danny’s confidante Marcia (Havana Rose Liu), a blue/green-eyed, biracial Asian beauty. She listens to his new composition unaware of its source yet responds with immediate ease that indicates the facetiousness of a trophy girlfriend, cued to accept the industry’s “emo”-brand sentimentality.
Finally, it is Danny himself, surprised when Rick travels across the ocean to confront him about the theft, who climaxes these trials and gives them substance. Lounging in a hot tub at his Hollywood Hills mansion, after dismissing the ministrations of his trophy girl and a third partner, half-naked Danny is caught by his victim and looks pale, almost infantile — another of this generation’s defenseless moral idiots.
In contrast to these epiphanies, 57-year-old Rudd has the kind of likability we used to trust in Tom Hanks, but with a romantic aspect now gone slightly to seed (as in Anaconda). But Rudd’s good-guy smile (in contrast with glib Nick Jonas) is believable, which makes Rick’s betrayal sting. He doesn’t fall for Danny’s alibi and corrects his fake-friendly excuse: “You were just out of context.”
A scene that fine — humanizing our current moral mess — raises Power Ballad above ersatz sentimentality, as if Carney learned much from Mike Leigh’s physiological, psychological observations of personal interaction. Power Ballad is more than a tale of music-industry subterfuge (purportedly based on the real-life legal battle of Robbie Williams and Ray Heffernan over the power ballad “Angel” that was left out of the superb biopic Better Man) — it offers a study in humility and survival. Carney’s previous films Sing Street, Begin Again, and the long-forgotten flash-in-the-pan Oscar winner Once offered sentimental, hackneyed clichés, but the cleverness here seems genuine. At last, Carney’s Dublin-to-Hollywood good humor — a leprechaun joke provokes a warning: “That can get you canceled. Or the presidency” — evokes good sense learned from recognizable experience.