Power Ballad

John Carney has exactly one story in him, a sad musician finds salvation through an unlikely creative partnership, and Power Ballad is roughly the fifth time he has told it. This round, Paul Rudd plays Rick, a past-his-prime wedding singer grinding through other people's happiest days, until fading boy-band star Danny, played by Nick Jonas, crashes one of his gigs and a late-night jam session changes both their lives. Then Danny lifts one of Rick's songs, turns it into the comeback hit of the summer, and the film briefly becomes something sharper, a story about who actually owns a melody. You can set your watch by the beats, and the premiere happened in Dublin because of course it did. And yet the formula hums along, annoyingly effective, like a chorus you swore you hated until you caught yourself singing it in the shower.

The miracle here is Rudd, who finally lets someone film him looking tired. Stripped of the smirk and the franchise paycheck glow, he plays Rick as a man who knows exactly how good he was and exactly how little that mattered, and it is quietly one of his best performances. Jonas, cast as a fading pop idol, is doing something closer to documentary than acting, and that self-awareness gives the film its pulse. When the two of them sit down with a guitar at two in the morning, Carney's old magic kicks in, the camera leans close, the room goes still, and for a few minutes you remember why this man keeps getting permission to make the same movie. The songs are genuinely good, which in this genre is not a bonus, it is the entire load-bearing wall.

The problems arrive on schedule, like everything else in the script. Havana Rose Liu and Jack Reynor are handed characters who exist mostly to wait for the leads, and the film's thorniest idea, that the music industry launders theft as collaboration, gets gently sedated before the finale so nobody leaves the theater upset. Every confrontation resolves exactly one scene after you call it, and the ending wraps a legal and moral knot with a hug and a key change. It is cowardice, beautifully scored. And still, here is the bright side, and it is a real one: Power Ballad earns its tears honestly, the songs will live in your head for a week, and Rudd proves there is a serious actor underneath all that eternal boyishness. Carney's formula is a cage, but inside that cage, the man still sings.