"Power Ballad," Reviewed: A Bromantic Conflict Over a Hit Song

A middle-aged American wedding singer in a Dublin suburb lives a structured domestic life while feeling blocked in his songwriting ambitions. He plays in a cover band and struggles to break into a real music career. His path crosses with a former boy-band star seeking material for a solo direction. The story centers on what happens when great work from an unrecognized artist is appropriated without credit by a rich and powerful performer. The plot moves with tight pacing and catchy musical momentum, using warmhearted populism and sentimental focus on family and friends who both nurture and hinder the dream.

"Genius hiding in daily life is similarly at the heart of the Irish director John Carney's new film, "Power Ballad," a musical dramedy starring Paul Rudd as an American rocker in Ireland who crosses paths with a former boy-band star (Nick Jonas) in search of a solo career. It's the story of what happens when an unrecognized artist's great work is appropriated without credit by another artist who's rich and powerful. In "Power Ballad," this premise (a version of which, oddly enough, also appears in Boots Riley's new film, "I Love Boosters") is worked into a plot that's admirably tight and irresistibly catchy."

"Carney, who wrote the script with Peter McDonald, develops it in one and only one register: warmhearted populism. "Power Ballad" is a sentimental tale of family and friends both fostering and thwarting a dream. It finds an unusually strong current of authentic (if narrow) emotion while leaving wilder ideas and feelings trapped beneath its surface."

"Rudd plays Rick Power, a middle-aged American wedding singer living in cozy domesticity in Crumlin, a suburb of Dublin. Formerly part of an American band that toured in Ireland, he's married to an Irish woman, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), with whom he has a fourteen-year-old daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon). Rick is a devoted family man who organizes his life rigorously and cheerfully around each morning's school drop-off, but he has a nagging frustration: he prides himself on his songwriting, yet his music career is limited to playing in a cover band called the Bride and Groove."

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