Power Ballad (2026)
John Carney's Power Ballad turns Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas loose on a stolen-song story that nearly earns him his overdue Oscar.
From the Author
There is a particular kind of filmmaker whose entire body of work is one long argument, and John Carney has been making the same beautiful case since Once: that music is the most honest thing two people can build together, and that the act of making it matters more than what the market does to it afterward. Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son, all of them circle this. Power Ballad is the biggest version of that argument he has attempted, the one with the largest canvas and the most recognizable faces, and it sharpens the question into something almost uncomfortable. What does it mean to make something pure, and then watch it turn into a commodity in somebody else's hands?
Rick (Paul Rudd) is a Dublin wedding singer who, fourteen years ago, walked away from a tangible shot at a music career. He toured, he met a woman, he had a daughter, the label dropped him, and he settled into the workmanlike grind of playing other people's first dances. At one of those weddings he crosses paths with Danny (Nick Jonas), a fading boy-band star scrambling for a comeback single, and the two of them bond over a late-night jam on a song Rick wrote for his daughter, a track called "How To Write A Song Without You." Months later that song is sitting at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, performed by Danny, and Rick is left grappling with the fact that the most personal thing he ever made now belongs to a stranger's career. Marcella Plunkett as Rick's wife Rachel, Jack Reynor, and Havana Rose Liu also star.
What lifts this above a simple story of theft is how generous Carney is with the moral weight. Rick wanted that life. He wanted Madison Square Garden, the number-one record, all of it, and the cruelty is not that Danny is a villain but that Danny is living the exact future Rick traded away for love. Rudd handles this with a control that sneaks up on you. He has spent a career being the most likeable man in the room, and here he lets that likeability fray, showing you a person who is fundamentally decent and also quietly eaten alive by what could have been. The song being about his daughter is the knife: the thing he made out of love is the thing that now has a second life without him in it. That is a richer engine than most musicals bother to build.
Jonas is the surprise. The Jonas Brothers have a longer screen history than people remember, but nothing about Camp Rock prepared me for the chemistry he and Rudd strike whenever they share a scene. There is a real instinct underneath the polish. The frustration is that the film does not trust it. Danny is kept at arm's length for long stretches, and the pressure he is under as a manufactured star, the part that would make him a full human being rather than a plot function, only lands in the climactic confrontation between the two men. By the time you feel the full weight of his side, the movie is nearly over. I do not know whether that is a writing choice or a read on the limits of Jonas as a dramatic lead, and I am inclined to be kind here because he is good when he is on screen, but the structure leaves him stranded.
That structural softness is the one real flaw, and it is worth being precise about where it sits. The movie takes too long to get across the bridge to the song being stolen, which means the descent that should be the spine of the second act gets compressed into the final forty-five minutes and plays out faster than it should. You want more time with Rick before the meltdown, more time living inside the strange double bind where he still loves his family but now has a radio hit that exists only because he made a choice he cannot take back. This is the same complaint I had about Flora and Son, a Carney habit of finding the exact right premise and then not quite living in it long enough. The other thing keeping it from a top mark is a tendency to play full songs end to end at nearly every opportunity. I understand that the love of music is the whole point, and I am arguing against my own praise here, but you do not need a complete rendition every single time the guitar comes out.
To be clear, none of this is fatal, because the fundamentals are simply strong. Carney has never made a bad movie. At worst his films are a thoroughly pleasant way to spend an evening, and at best, Sing Street, they stick to you for years. Power Ballad lands closer to the top of that range than the bottom, and a great deal of that comes down to the central song doing exactly what a Carney song needs to do. "How To Write A Song Without You" feels modern. It feels like something you would actually hear on the radio on your morning commute rather than a movie's idea of a hit, which is the precise quality that won Golden its acclaim last year, and it is the quality Sing Street had in spades.
Which brings up the old wound. Sing Street came out in 2016 and was somehow shut out of the Best Original Song race entirely, a snub that still does not make sense, likely a case of its own strong soundtrack splitting the vote while La La Land hoovered up the nominations. Power Ballad has a real shot at the recognition that eluded him, with the caveat that a new Taylor Swift song from Toy Story 5 dropped the same day and will almost certainly take the slot on its way to completing her EGOT. The universe has a way of nerfing Carney at the Academy. Still, it feels like his moment to break into the mainstream, and on the strength of this, he has earned it. If you have any affection for the way music can carry a story, you should see this.
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