YNOT at the Movies

What happens when two musicians, worlds apart in fame and circumstance, discover they share the same dream? Director John Carney's "Power Ballad" (Ireland/USA 2026 | 98 min.) answers that question with humor, heart, and more than a few songs worth hearing twice. It is a film about creative desperation, stolen credit, and the painful gap between the artist you are and the one you always believed you could be. John Carney, the director behind "Once" (2006) and "Sing Street" (2016), has never been more assured in his belief that a song can say what people cannot, and this film makes that case with wit, generosity, and original music worth listening to.

The premise is deceptively simple. Rick Power (Paul Rudd), a forty-something American wedding singer in Dublin, shares a remarkable late-night jam session with fading pop star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas). A song is born. A song is stolen. Six months later, when Danny releases "How to Write a Song" as a smash hit that reignites his solo career, the fallout forces both men to reckon with who they really are. It sounds like a setup for a legal drama, but the film wisely keeps the film grounded in music and feeling, not courtroom procedure.

Those familiar with the director's previous work will feel right at home.John Carney has always used music not as decoration but as emotional argument, the thing characters say when words fail them. This latest film works in the same register, and the original songs co-written with frequent collaborator Gary Clark do their job beautifully. The standout, "How to Write a Song," earns its central importance. One song. Two men. Completely different meanings. That's vintage Carney.

What makes the film genuinely affecting is that you feel for both men equally. Rick's frustration weighs in from years of compromise and talent quietly shelved for the sake of a good life. But so does Danny's desperation, the particular terror of a once-famous man watching the world move on without him. You understand why he did what he did, even as you wince at it. Both artists are chasing the same thing: the reassurance that they matter, that what they made means something.

Paul Rudd is excellent. He doesn't overplay Rick's frustration or sentimentality, and his musical scenes feel earned rather than performed. Nick Jonas brings real authenticity to Danny, drawing convincingly on his own experience as a performer who has known both massive success and the silence that can follow it. Co-writer and co-star Peter McDonald provides reliable comic warmth as Rick's band mate Sandy. What's particularly smart is that the film resists painting Danny as a straightforward villain. He is man still with some conscience. The guilt festers visibly behind the celebrity smile, and Jonas carries that moral weight with restraint. A Danny stripped of any inner conflict would have made the film smaller and cheaper than it deserves to be.

Where the film stumbles is in its third act, when Rick heads to Los Angeles to confront Danny on his own turf. The escalation requires a degree of credulity that the film hasn't quite earned. If bypassing a pop star's security is this straightforward, one wonders how any celebrity in LA sleeps soundly at night. The sequence is played with enough good humor to survive the implausibility, but it's the one stretch where the script coasts on charm rather than logic.

Carney continues to make the most empathetic argument in cinema: that music belongs to whoever needs it most, and that the person who writes a song and the person who makes it soar are sometimes two different, equally valid things.

"Power Ballad" opens in theaters on Friday, June 05, 2026.