Good news: John Carney is back.
“Once,” “Begin Again,” “Sing Street,” “Flora and Son.” Carney is an Irish auteur who’s managed to keep making indie movies unfettered by studio interference. Each one is a little music-centric gem that can be watched over and over.
Carney’s new one is “Power Ballad,” which opens June 5th and premiered last night in unusually torturous May heat and humidity, and in the worst place for those conditions, Times Square. But the movie is so incredibly charming, we tried not to care.
The big news is that “Power Ballad” — set in Ireland and Beverly Hills, and really a disarming look at the creative process of making pop music — stars Nick Jonas as a conflicted, not so nice former boy bander who needs a hit desperately. Jonas always plays a good guy on TV and in movies, and beams with positive energy when he sings with his brothers. So this might seem like a stretch. But it’s not.
Paul Rudd is Jonas’s counter balance. He’s a veteran singer and songwriter living in Ireland because of his wife. He’s the quintessential good guy who’s a wedding singer but should have been a contender.
The pair cross paths at a wedding, hit it off, and doing a little all night jamming. Rudd’s Rick Power helps Nick’s Danny Wilson finish some songs and then walks away. Months later he hears one of those songs in a mall and realizes he’s been snookered.
BTW, how many times have you read in this space about a pop star appropriating someone else’s song? I told just you about one case last week.
The song Rick hears is called “How to Write a Song without You,” and it’s a hit. I mean, in real life. When it’s released next week, the single should be something for Jonas to take up the charts. There are versions of him singing it alone and with Rudd, who performs a lot in the movie and acquits himself very well as more than just a wedding singer. I’d be surprised if “How to Write a Song Without You” isn’t a Best Song nominee at the Oscars next year.
The song is written, by the way, by Gary Clark, one of the UK’s best pop-smiths. Forty years ago, Clark fronted a group called Danny Wilson, which was named for a character in a Frank Sinatra movie called “Meet Danny Wilson.” Danny Wilson has two excellent albums still streaming everywhere. (I was obsessed with the first one.) Now, after all this time, Clark may really get his due. Sinatra would be very happy.
One thing t look for in the movie: Jonas and Rudd performing Stevie Wonder’s 1976 “I Wish.” It was a full circle moment for Nick Jonas since he and his brothers once performed with superstar Stevie on the Grammys. Carney told me last night he’s not sure if Stevie even knows “I Wish” is in a movie yet, and that it wasn’t so hard to license it.
Carney is a gifted but underrated storyteller. He told me it took 8 years to make this film, and part of that involved a chance meeting with a potential backer. He loves the music business and totally gets nuances that resonate with verisimilitude. He gets the dichotomy of the persistence of artists to remain true to their spirit despite record labels wanting to homogenize them, a story that never ends. There’s a lot of wide eyed idealism in his films, and the good news that it always pays off.
There’s a twist at the end of “Power Ballad,” worth waiting for. Carney told me last night, “You put in all that time for those two minutes.” He knows how to pull off a heart in the throat moment, when all the feels come together in an organic way. You’re caught unawares, and by then the credits are rolling and you want to see “Power Ballad” again.
Carney, by the way, tells me this movie his really taken over his career. His next project “will definitely involve Paul Rudd” — “I have plans for him,” he said. He’s also “in business” with Clark. As for Jonas, even Carney knows a rock star must move on. But boy, he did a terrific job here.
