Entertainment
Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas Clash in This Must-Watch Film From a Masterful Director
John Carney has nailed the art of being a musical underdog. After the huge Oscar-winning indie hit Once, Carney has made plenty of great, underseen musicals that deserve more appreciation. Carney’s movies beautifully explore the power of music in the lives of normal, everyday people, and how impactful something as simple as a song can be on a person. Once gave us a pair of musicians going from busking to making an album together. 2013’s Begin Again followed a budding songwriter trying to get a break. The cult favorite Sing Street had a boy forming a band just to impress a girl, while 2023’s Flora and Son showed a mother attempting to connect with her son through music. Carney doesn’t make grand musical movies. More importantly, he makes movies about how music can be grand in people’s lives.
Carney continues this trend with Power Ballad, a wonderful music comedy that’s a lovely addition to his oeuvre, as he explores questions of who owns a song and how a song can mean something completely different for two different people. Compared to his other recent work, Carney’s latest pulls back a bit on the music and leans more into the comedy side of things, yet Power Ballad maintains the heart and optimism that is brimming from all his films, and hopefully, it will get the attention it deserves.
‘Power Ballad’ Has Paul Rudd Facing Off Against Nick Jonas
Paul Rudd stars as Rick, who is the lead singer of a wedding band in Ireland named The Bride and the Groove. Rick used to be part of an up-and-coming rock band a few decades ago known as Octagon, but while on tour in Ireland, he met his future wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), then they had a kid, and Rick decided to settle down in the Emerald Isle. When he plays with his band, he still has those dreams of rock stardom. As his bandmate tells him, they’re “human jukeboxes,” not rock stars.
While performing at a particularly fancy wedding, the band is joined onstage by Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), a former boy band star who is now trying to make it on his own (sound familiar?) Later on, Rick and Danny spend the night hanging out, playing music for each other, getting drunk, and genuinely appreciating each other and their shared love of music. Amongst this, Rick drunkenly plays the bits and pieces of a song called “How To Write a Song (Without You)” for Danny, and the next morning, the pair go their separate ways.
But six months later, Rick hears a song that sounds oddly familiar playing in the mall. It turns out that Danny has completed “How To Write a Song (Without You)” and released it as his own. The track becomes the massive hit song Danny needed to work on his own as a solo artist, and it catapults him into even greater popularity. Meanwhile, the success of the song causes Rick to have a bit of a breakdown, as he tries to prove that the song was stolen from him, though he doesn’t have the receipts to prove it. Rick makes it his goal to show that this gigantic hit song is thanks to him and wants to at least get Danny to admit the truth about where he got his inspiration from.
John Carney Tries Something New With ‘Power Ballad’
Written by Carney as well as co-writer/co-star Peter McDonald, Power Ballad does feel structurally different than what we’ve come to expect from Carney. So many of Carney’s past films have been about the creation of music and the tremendous alchemy of that. While that’s absolutely an important factor in this film, beyond Rick and Danny’s hangout, and a scene where Danny tries to work through creating his own songs, music creation is really just the inciting incident for Power Ballad. Instead, the film tracks both the shooting star that is Danny back in America, as well as the frustrating blow that this theft is to Rick in Ireland. It’s an interesting change of pace for Carney, but it shows that he can still focus his films on music, and approach that in an entirely different way from one film to another.
If anything, maybe the biggest disappointment in Power Ballad is that the film doesn’t have more original music in it — especially compared to other Carney works. Beyond a catchy opening song and “How To Write a Song (Without You),” we don’t get nearly enough music written by Carney and Gary Clark. Narratively, it makes sense, considering the film isn’t focused on the process of creating music, but rather, delving into the ownership of music. Yet considering how delightful the songs are in a movie like Sing Street or Once, two songs just don’t feel like enough.
Here, Carney and McDonald are more interested in looking at the idea of whom a song belongs to. Considering so many of Carney’s films have been primarily about the craft of writing a song, it is fascinating to see Carney and McDonald exploring deeper questions about music itself. Yes, we know Rick wrote most of the song at the center of this film, but we also know Danny brought it across the finish line and polished it into something Rick could’ve never crafted on his own. It’s also a fantastic look at how perception can completely alter a piece of art, as both Rick and Danny have their own meanings behind the song they believe to be their own. Especially as the song finds gargantuan success, the music itself becomes even bigger than either one of them.
Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas Are a Delight in ‘Power Ballad’
Power Ballad also makes a great stage for both Rudd and Jonas to push themselves. In the last few years, Rudd has been trying out smaller films, both good (Friendship) and not-so-good (Death of a Unicorn), but it’s a delight to see Rudd returning to more indie filmmaking. With Power Ballad, not only do we get to hear Rudd’s talent for singing and being a pretty excellent lead singer of a band, but it’s also an all-too-rare opportunity for Rudd to show off his dramatic skills in a way that he really hasn’t in quite some time. It’s gratifying to see Rudd once more in a role where he can be charming, funny, and dramatic, all in a film where he’s the lead role.
This also makes a strong presentation of Nick Jonas’ talents as an actor, even if he is playing a thinly-veiled version of himself. Jonas matches Rudd’s charm, and even though we see the theft happening in front of our eyes, it’s hard not to like Jonas’ Danny, a character who also similarly wants to prove he has talent, but doesn’t know quite how to do it commercially. In watching these two together, we see them both struggling with their desire to be stars — one just has their foot in the door, while the other doesn’t even seem to know where the door is. We don’t get much time with Rudd and Jonas together, but their scenes together do comprise some of the best of the film, and they’re a truly wonderful match.
Carney is one of the best current creators of heartfelt, uncynical stories about the power of music, and Power Ballad marks yet another impressive addition to that canon. Rudd and Jonas fit into his style quite nicely, and Carney once again proves that he’s a master of crowd-pleasing, heartwarming stories about underdogs we all want to root for.
Power Ballad screened at the 2026 SXSW Festival. It comes to theaters on June 6.
- Release Date
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May 29, 2026
- Runtime
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98 minutes
- Director
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John Carney
- Writers
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Peter McDonald, John Carney
- Producers
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Anthony Bregman, John Carney, Peter Cron, Rebecca O’Flanagan, Robert Walpole
- John Carney is great at these type of underdog stories set in the world of music.
- Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas make a great pairing that balances each other well.
- Carney and Peter McDonald balance the comedy and drama nicely with an uncynical, crowd-pleasing story.
- A few more songs would’ve been great.
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