The Song Remains His: John Carney’s “Power Ballad” Arrives on Blu-ray

John Carney has spent nearly twenty years making the same movie, and I mean that as the highest compliment available. Two people meet, they make music together, the music changes them, and nobody ends up where a lesser filmmaker would have parked them. He did it in Once for pocket change and walked away with an Academy Award for the song. He did it again in Begin Again, then in Sing Street, then in Flora and Son.

Power Ballad is that movie with a knife in it, and it lands on Blu-ray August 25 from Lionsgate.

Rick Power, of the Bride and Groove

The setup is Carney at his most charming before it turns. Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, an American who has spent fifteen years in Dublin fronting a wedding band with the magnificent name the Bride and Groove, grinding out reliable versions of jukebox standards for other people’s happiest days. He gave up on headlining arenas somewhere along the way, and he has a wife, Rachel, played by Marcella Plunkett, and a teenage daughter named Aja. The life is smaller than the dream and better than he admits.

At one of those gigs he meets Danny, played by Nick Jonas, a boy-band alumnus whose solo career has stalled into a polite middling. They perform together, they slip away for a late-night jam, they trade stories and half-finished ideas the way musicians do when they have found someone who actually gets it.

Then Danny takes one of Rick’s songs, turns it into the hit that resurrects his career, and Rick sets out to get his name back.

Carney Finally Wrote a Wound

Here is what makes this one worth your attention rather than just your affection. Carney’s films are typically generous to the point of being almost weightless. The music heals, the partnership is pure, and the villain, if there is one, is vague circumstance.

Power Ballad gives the ugly side of human nature a real fighting chance. Rick’s crusade for credit is legitimate and also corrosive, and the film is willing to let him risk the family and the life he actually has in pursuit of recognition for a song. Meanwhile it refuses to make Danny a simple thief. Jonas plays him as someone processed by an industry that turns a life into raw material and a person into a brand-management project, and the performance is the pleasant surprise of the picture. Critics who arrived expecting a pop star doing a favor for himself came out singling him out.

Rudd, meanwhile, is doing exactly what Rudd does best, which is being so effortlessly likable that you keep giving him the benefit of the doubt well past the point where you should. That is not a limitation here. That is the trap the movie sets.

Co-writer Peter McDonald also appears in the cast, and Jack Reynor turns up as well, reuniting with the director who gave him one of his best roles in Sing Street.

It Deserved Better Than It Got

The reception was rapturous. Power Ballad premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival in March, went to SXSW, and posted a perfect critical score out of the gate, with reviewers calling it Carney’s strongest work since Once and predicting an original song nomination for the tune at its center.

And then it went to theaters in late May and essentially evaporated. A well-reviewed, mid-budget, adult-oriented musical comedy with movie stars in it could not find a foothold in the summer marketplace, which is a sentence that describes roughly every film of its type released in the last five years.

Which is precisely why this disc matters. For a film like this, physical media is not a victory lap after a theatrical run. It is the actual distribution. This is how most people are going to see Power Ballad, and how it will still be watchable in fifteen years when whatever service currently holds the streaming rights has quietly dropped it. That is the whole argument for keeping shelves in your house, and this release is a clean example of it.

What You Get, and What You Do Not

The package is a Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital combo priced at $39.99, arriving August 25. The extras run to three featurettes, one on the making of the film, one on its music, and one titled The Power of Paul Rudd, plus theatrical trailers.

Let me be straight about that. Forty dollars is aggressive for a combo pack of a recent title, and the supplements are pleasant rather than substantial. The music featurette is the one that matters, and I hope it goes deep, because the songs are the reason this film works. What is conspicuously absent is a commentary track. Carney is a genuinely thoughtful, articulate filmmaker working in a very specific mode, and a movie about the ethics of songwriting credit is practically begging for him to talk through it. Its absence is the one real disappointment on the spec sheet.

Still, the film itself is the draw, and it holds up to repeat viewings the way Carney’s work always does. Watch our music coverage for more on the soundtrack front.

The Irony Sings

There is a lovely circularity to all of this. Carney made a film about a man fighting to be credited for a song, and Carney is a director whose own career was launched when a song he shepherded won an Oscar. He knows exactly what a single piece of music is worth, in money and in dignity, and how rarely those two things get assigned to the same person.

Power Ballad hits shelves August 25. If you missed it in theaters, which statistically you did, this is your chance to correct the record.