Power Ballad (2026)
John Carney has spent nearly two decades making films about people who were almost someone; who once held a song they believed in completely, then watched the world move on and take no notice. Power Ballad is his most commercially polished attempt at that territory, and, in my opinion, his most morally serious.
Rick Power (Paul Rudd) is an American who has been fronting a Dublin wedding band for fifteen years, singing other people’s songs at other people’s milestones. He carries his tiredness with a particular weight. The accumulated cost of someone who had genuine belief and spent it without a return. At a gig, he crosses paths with Danny (Nick Jonas), a fading boy-band star whose commercial wattage has dimmed but whose charm is apparently unkillable. The two bond over music and a late-night jam session, and something resembling genuine kinship forms between them. Then Danny takes one of Rick’s compositions, a song of considerable personal weight, and turns it into a global hit without attribution. What Rick demands in response is not compensation but acknowledgement, and the film’s interest lies in examining what acknowledgement can and cannot actually give back.
The film’s concern is what we actually want when we say we want recognition. Not money, but something more specific and more difficult: the admission that the song was his and an understanding of what it meant to him. The film holds onto that distinction even during the moments when a clean resolution would be more convenient for everyone involved, Rick included. Whether any public acknowledgement can restore a private, interior experience is a question Power Ballad keeps open deliberately, which accounts for much of the film’s tension.
Paul Rudd is doing some of the better work of his career here. He plays Rick as a man who made peace with his own mediocrity until peace was no longer sufficient, and he does it without reaching for sympathy or telegraphing his intentions. Nick Jonas, meanwhile, is surprisingly effective in a role that requires him to be simultaneously magnetic and hollow; a person whose identity has been assembled, piece by piece, by other people’s expectations. The film is most alive in the scenes where the two actors are left to negotiate the gap between what their characters say and what they mean.
Where Power Ballad stumbles is where Carney films have always stumbled: the music itself. The song at the centre of the story is called “How to Write a Song (Without You)”, and the film asks us to believe it could plausibly conquer the world. It is a likeable, well-crafted pop song, but it does not generate the kind of response in the audience that the film needs it to generate; the feeling, shared with the characters, that this particular arrangement of notes and words could stop people cold. Carney has run into this problem across several films now, and Power Ballad does not escape it.
The final act reaches for emotional resolution a little earlier than it has earned it, and the moral complications the film has built so carefully get set aside before they have been fully worked through. The ending is genuinely affecting, though the warmth it delivers comes partly at the expense of the ambiguity that preceded it.
Carney nonetheless demonstrates something about his subject that the film builds carefully toward: the music industry’s talent is not simply exploitation but something more specific; the repackaging of sincerity, stripping a song of its original meaning and selling what remains to people who have no way of knowing what was removed. Rick’s predicament belongs to anyone whose private meaning has been converted into a public commodity, and the film’s decision to make that case through warmth and comedy rather than bitterness is, in my view, its real achievement; and one that is harder to sustain than it appears.
Power Ballad is a good film that comes within reach of being a more demanding one, and the distance between those two things is smaller than its occasional softness suggests.