{"id":847178,"date":"2026-06-05T23:03:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T23:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/847178\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T23:03:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T23:03:17","slug":"can-power-ballad-thrive-despite-no-youtube-phenoms-or-jump-scares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/847178\/","title":{"rendered":"Can ‘Power Ballad Thrive Despite No YouTube Phenoms Or Jump Scares?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE<\/strong>: When Power Ballad<\/a> opened the Sands Film Festival in St. Andrews Scotland recently, the audience reaction was rapturous. Same with showings at SXSW, Dublin and in a limited release last week. Sending festival audiences into a lather has been a regular occurrence for writer\/director John Carney<\/a> since he premiered Once at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, before the $150,000 budget film won an Oscar for Best Original Song, grossed $23 million and spawned a stage musical. He got the same reaction when he brought Sing Street to Sundance in 2016. <\/p>\n

\n\tDirectors like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese are masterful at creating indelible movie moments plugging established tunes into key scenes. But when it comes to being fluent in the language of the creation of music enough to use it as the propulsion for honest and audience-friendly storytelling moments that are best enjoyed in a communal moviegoing experience, there is no one like the musician-turned-filmmaker Carney. Except maybe Cameron Crowe, whose music bona-fides came from absorbing wisdom from top \u201870s rock bands as a teen journalist for Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n

\n\tEach time I see a Carney-directed film, I wonder, will this be his Almost Famous, or his Jerry Maguire? I had the same feeling at the Power Ballad premiere, about a drunken night between an Ireland-based wedding singer (Paul Rudd<\/a>) and a former boyband singer (Nick Jonas<\/a>), each desperate to not feel like their best days are in the rearview. A stolen song and an ensuing U.S. road trip propels a comedy grounded by genuine musical moments and an understanding of the struggle to create an original hit song. He\u2019s like a master mechanic with grease under the fingernails, making a movie about fast cars. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat the film doesn\u2019t have is the kind of things that rule box office right now. No YouTube phenom-generated genre, or an iconic musical subject like Michael Jackson, whose controversy-free biopic is on course to top Bohemian Rhapsody en route to $1 billion in grosses. Lionsgate<\/a> released and marketed that film also. <\/p>\n

\n\tPower Ballad goes from limited to wide release today as Lionsgate opens it on 1200 screens and hopes stellar reviews and strong word of mouth hold those screens as counterprogramming. In the heat of summer movie season, is there room for Power Ballad to slowly build word of mouth and a respectable audience in the heat of summer?<\/p>\n

\n\tI would have thought Carney\u2019s breakthrough would have come after the 2013 Toronto premiere of Can A Song Save Your Life. The film had a strong cast, and powerful musical moments like when a songwriter (Keira Knightley) listens to a song by her singer boyfriend (Adam Levine) and can tell he\u2019s been unfaithful on the road, and when a down and out and freshly fired record exec (Mark Ruffalo) stews drunkenly at a bar until he hears the songwriter pour out her pain onstage, armed only with a guitar. Suddenly in his head he is adding an entire arrangement to her song \u2013 we see the song come to life \u2014 and it gives both a second chance.<\/p>\n

\n\tBuyers left the screening to huddle with their teams and run the numbers on the value of a film everybody wanted. Harvey Weinstein went right to the afterparty and charmed Carney into a deal. Weinstein promptly took a perfect title and changed it to the perfectly benign Begin Again, and whether it was because of the cash crunch The Weinstein Company was going through or because he didn\u2019t see a hit, the movie didn\u2019t soar. At an $8 million budget, the film did respectable business but it could have positioned Carney for better had it not underperformed stateside.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI agree, I think the film should have done a little bit more business than it did, but I\u2019m not bitter or sore,\u201d Carney said. \u201cIt is what it is. I\u2019m in film for the long term and I\u2019m happy if the film does well, even it is after I\u2019m dead when people acknowledge it. I\u2019m not sure Lionsgate will love hearing this, but I\u2019m not interested in like how the first weekend is.\u00a0 Tons of great movies that we love bombed when they came out, and then 10 or 20 years later, they became classics. But that said, I don\u2019t think Begin Again is a classic movie, but I think that it should have done what, $40 million stateside or something like that. And it should be a movie that more people know. I don\u2019t have much to say about Harvey Weinstein, and Jesus Christ, I\u2019m the least of the people that he\u2019s worried. But he didn\u2019t get the movie, I think. Didn\u2019t understand it. There were different offers at the time and we didn\u2019t really know what we had with that film. It is a hard movie to sell because it\u2019s like, what is it, a romcom? A musical? And a lot of the stars in it weren\u2019t as big stars as they are now. Ruffalo is a household name. Myself and Ruffalo were cycling around on bikes while shooting that movie. A couple times people were like, \u201cI think that\u2019s the guy from The Hulk.\u201d He had just done that first movie. I think we were like, \u201cI don\u2019t really know what to do with this film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis time, Carney\u2019s got another Marvel hero in Paul Rudd, who has played Ant-Man in multiple movies including the Avengers blockbusters. His character is a wannabe rock star who fell in love with an Irish gal, swallowed his rock star dreams, content raising a daughter and fronting the wedding band Bride & Groove. Carney also has Nick Jonas in the role of the washed-up boyband singer eager for a comeback and not above appropriating someone\u2019s work and turning it into a hit song to fuel those ambitions.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNick Jonas as Danny and Paul Rudd as Rick in Power Ballad. Photo Credit: David Cleary<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLionsgate<\/p>\n

\n\tIn his acting career, Jonas has assiduously avoided borrowing from the fan base from the Jonas Brothers, which disbanded but is now performing again. He instead has taken roles like in the Sundance fraternity hazing film Goat, or playing a closeted MMA fighter in the gritty series Kingdom, and costarring in the Jumanji remake franchise. Jonas made an exception here right after reading the script Carney wrote with Peter McDonald. Writing and performing songs from an early age, Jonas recognized a kindred spirit in Carney.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cJohn is a musician, he started as a musician and music is so a part of him,\u201d Jonas said. \u201cIt\u2019s in the marrow of his bones so much so that there\u2019ll be guitars sitting by the video village and he\u2019ll sometimes just have to pick it up and play for a while. There\u2019s a piano on set. He\u2019ll sit down and play during lunch. He lives it, he breathes it and he directs like a musician. If by some divine inspiration, a chord progression were to enter his head, he\u2019ll follow it and he\u2019ll pursue it, whether it\u2019s music or the direction of a scene. And he really treasures it. His relationship with music is not a superficial or light relationship. I think he feels compelled to serve the music in a way. And because he knows it so well and knows the world, the characters that he creates know it and he uses it in the way that [music is] intended, which is to make our lives better. I\u2019d been a fan of his forever and when I heard about this script and they shared a log line, it was a pretty simple decision. When I read the whole script, \u00a0I felt really connected to this character, not only for some of the similarities to my own journey, the bigger idea that my character is just trying to find himself after having success in a group vehicle and then breaking out on his own. I\u2019ve lived some of those experiences and felt deeply connected to it. And then I heard the music and fell in love with that. When I heard that Paul was doing the movie, I was thrilled. I\u2019ve always been a fan and dreamed of working with him. That first day on set was the scene where we\u2019re in the suite together writing, jamming and drinking. And it was the perfect way to set the stage for the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe singing was second nature to Jonas. With Rudd, a lot was taken on faith after the production team eyed a video of him singing Wichita Lineman. They hoped for the best. For his part, Rudd jumped in without thinking much about the pressure to perform.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m such a John Carney fan, love his movies, and I signed on and it wasn\u2019t until just before I started, that I had a different feeling that I\u2019d ever had before. Which was, oh my God, should I have done this? So you just close your eyes, jump in the deep end, hope for the best. And I found the entire experience to be a real joyful one, but nerve-wracking in very specific moments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Tom Hanks made That Thing You Do, he labored long and hard to find just the right song that wouldn\u2019t wear out its welcome being heard throughout the film. Surprisingly, the construction of the signature song in Power Ballad happened late in the process, with Carney providing Gary Clark the beginnings of a tune with lyrics that fit the narrative and Clark rounded it into a solid tune that has ear worm qualities but not in an unpleasant way.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe tune How To Write A Song Without You is heard throughout the film, and it came together so late that Carney hadn\u2019t given much thought to whether Rudd could really sing, or the intrigue of Jonas tapping into his boy band past. Carney actually wasn\u2019t familiar with The Jonas Brothers and he too jumped into the deep end with Rudd.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen Paul came on board the film, we didn\u2019t have that conversation,\u201d Carney said. \u201dIt was almost like say you\u2019re in the movie and let\u2019s cross that bridge when we come to it. We were down in the studio recording the soundtrack for the movie and the film was happening and nobody had really heard Paul sing. I staged this phone call with him because all of the musicians were around and with [composer] Gary Clark, and I said, \u2018Is there a way I could kind of get Paul to sing on the phone and if I could then get the thumbs up from our crew, it would be fine. Paul was on the phone and we were talking about the selections of the songs for the wedding band and I was like, \u201cI wonder, what key do you think you\u2019re happy singing in? He said, \u2018I don\u2019t know.\u2019 Okay, everybody is looking at me and I said, sing and we will sort it. He started singing, Wichita Lineman I think it was. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever told Paul that I was doing this but he sang this country song beautifully. And everybody breathed a sign of relief, like \u2018whew.\u2019 I would say he passed the audition but he did not know that he was effectively auditioning at that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for Jonas, Carney said it was only other people that were like, \u2018Nick Jonas, is he not too close?\u2019 \u201cI didn\u2019t know who that Nick Jonas was. I met him on Zoom and I had seen him in that movie about hazing, and from that, this was to me it was a no-brainer. I just knew that between that acting and my Zoom with the guy that he can pull this off. It was only the people who knew how big Nick was in terms of like American culture or pop culture who were a bit worried about Disney. But me and Nick weren\u2019t remotely worried.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCarney expects his next film will revolve around music once again. Surprisingly, he has no North Star musical movie, because his fascination with the role of music in storytelling began in a most unusual way.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c I grew up watching movies that my parents were watching and listening to the musical score,\u201d Carney said. \u201cI genuinely thought, well, that is so affecting that it could only be the writer, the director, the author of the story putting those strings on because it\u2019s working so well. And only later started to realize that actually the director very rarely, if ever, has much to say about that process.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was five, or six or eight, hearing these great old movies playing in our house and being moved by them because of the music. I sure as hell didn\u2019t understand what Elizabeth Taylor was saying to Richard Burton in Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. But I did understand the music playing at certain points. When they\u2019re both looking out the window and this tremendous score comes up, I could understand and I knew something was wrong with this couple. In so many of those great earlier Hollywood movies, the composers were so good. So many of them were Jewish exiles who had been run out, all over Europe. They would have been incredible composers in their home countries, but some of them ended up in Hollywood, writing these scores that were so much better often than the movies that they were appearing in. The brilliant classical music in 30s and 40s Hollywood movies was the thing that was giving me the goosebumps. And what melded together for me was that idea of the images and that stunning music.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOn the Waterfront, when they\u2019re in the back of the car and all of that dialogue that I realize now, I actually didn\u2019t understand what any of it meant when I was 12 or 13,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that Marlon Brando secretly had been harboring those feelings that the brother had kept him down. \u2018I could have been someone, I could have been a contender,\u2019 I didn\u2019t really know what that meant. I didn\u2019t even know he was a boxer in that movie, but I knew what the music was doing and it was breaking my heart. If you listen to the music in that movie, it\u2019s just extraordinary. I have 50 examples of things that only when I became an adult and I started to realize what life really was about that I actually understood the scenes, but I understood the intention behind them from these amazing European composers that were making the music. And when I got into film, the two things just went hand in hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCarney\u2019s emergence was a happy accident. He played bass alongside Glen Hansard, who was part of The Commitments ensemble cast and would become Carney\u2019s leading man in Once. Like that character, Carney made extra money entertaining passersby on the Dublin streets. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPeter McDonald as Sandy and Paul Rudd as Rick in Power Ballad. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLionsgate<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI busked when I was young, but in a very different way than Glen did or the guy in that movie did,\u201d Carney recalled. \u201cI did robotic dancing on Grafton Street to try and make money when I was a kid. And I made some money actually. It was quite a good act. I hustled in tons of different weird kind of experimental attempts to try and put movies together. I was broke when I made Once and I had had a little bit of success in television beforehand, but it had dried up and I didn\u2019t know what my next move was. And my girlfriend was in London and I was on my own in Ireland. Fo the first time in my life, I didn\u2019t know what was next and that was quite discombobulating. I put my money behind On The Edge, this one story that I had written that starred Cillian Murphy. It was really a good film in many ways for me because it wasn\u2019t that far from my existence and I wasn\u2019t faking. There\u2019s a sense about once that it\u2019s really cheap and cheerful and that\u2019s how I was. We couldn\u2019t afford to buy dinner for the crew, but we paid them whatever the minimum was and we kept it under 20 days. I look at pictures of myself and Glen [Hansard], we were skinny and gaunt and pale. It sounds ridiculous, but it\u2019s because we were hungry and broke. So there\u2019s very little faking it in that movie.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI left that to make short comedy sketches and slasher movies with my friends. And I think honestly, it probably coincided with the Irish film board starting again in Ireland. It had been around in the 80s as a tax subsidy for film people and it had been broken up and it had gone away when I was young. It came back together around \u201992, and so there was a little bit of money. If you wanted to become a filmmaker, you could dip into this and maybe get some money to complete a movie or edit a movie or get a camera or whatever. I would say if it wasn\u2019t for that, I wouldn\u2019t have managed to become a filmmaker. It gave you just enough of a taste of actually making a movie, and there weren\u2019t a lot of them in Ireland back then.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBecause we\u2019re not like America where there\u2019s huge cinemas everywhere and the film industry sort of takes care of itself and has a commercial interest,\u201d he said. \u201cIreland is a small country and we need subsidy. We need support and help to make movies, which are expensive. The second you turn a camera on, it\u2019s just burning money. I think that helped terrifically in myself and other filmmakers lives. And also, you\u2019re young, you\u2019re 20 and there\u2019s a fearlessness about when you\u2019re that age. There\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, I\u2019m a filmmaker now.\u201d And everybody\u2019s like, \u201cWhat?\u201d And there\u2019s some weird self-belief that you have when you\u2019re that age and life seems like it\u2019ll go on forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI mention that Carney\u2019s connection to the music in his movie plotlines seems genuine. We\u2019ve all heard of the screenwriter who writes a car movie and doesn\u2019t drive, or the computer hackers who tap a few keys and crack the CIA database. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve been watching Breaking Bad again, and you ask yourself, why is this show so bloody good? And I think there\u2019s lots of answers to that, but the big answer for me is it\u2019s relentless in its exploration of seeing these two guys try, fail, try, fail to become drug lords. They never just do the Hollywood thing where it\u2019s one scene and then they\u2019re bad guys. It never does that. It does for the drugs trade, it really goes into the failing and the comedy of failing of trying to become somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Carney, it\u2019s all about the depiction of the struggle.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI love lifting up the hood and going, \u201cOh, I see how this works.\u201d This is almost as good as driving the car, seeing how it works. And I think people love that actually. I think audiences now really respond to the idea of, \u201cI don\u2019t need to see the finished thing because we\u2019ve been looking at that for how many decades since the 20s? We wanted to remove the camera away and pretend it\u2019s not there and never show a boom. If a boom might came in, it was a disaster nowadays people kind of like knowing all of that stuff.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt seems like the struggle, whether it\u2019s to write a song, or the struggle to become an accomplished meth dealer, it\u2019s so much more interesting than the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI mention that the resonance of music in his films reminded me of Ryan Coogler\u2019s staging of the blues number I Lied to You in Sinners, which actually showed the connective tribal tissue between the roots of the blues, and subsequent musical forms like hip hop that were influenced by the music. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI loved that scene,\u201d Carney said. \u201cI thought it was terrific in how it developed that idea and went further with it than anything I could have done. I love seeing how anything works. I\u2019m not necessarily that crazy about the finished product, you know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: When Power Ballad opened the Sands Film Festival in St. Andrews Scotland recently, the audience reaction was…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":847179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,275739,12262,53,16003,33099,275493,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-847178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-john-carney","tag-lionsgate","tag-movies","tag-nick-jonas","tag-paul-rudd","tag-power-ballad","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116700002326338998","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}