Tickets for Power Ballad go on sale today, giving audiences their first easy path into John Carney’s latest music comedy before it reaches theaters on May 29. The film, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, carries an 88% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and pairs Paul Rudd with Nick Jonas in a story built around a song, a grudge and a long memory.
Rudd plays Rick, a former touring rocker who now works as a wedding singer in Ireland with his family. Jonas plays Danny, a pop boy-bander facing creative crises of his own. In the film, Rick plays Danny an unreleased power ballad he once wrote while the two are drinking, jamming and bonding. Months later, Rick hears Danny singing the song over a department store speaker, and the discovery sends him into revenge mode and on a mission to get the song back.
Carney said the character grew out of a sighting in Dublin, when he spotted a 40-something dad in a suburb with a ponytail and a guitar. He said the man “had the walk of a rock star, but like a rock star for whom it hadn’t happened.” That image fit neatly with the director’s own self-description as a “failed band guy,” the kind of outsider perspective that has shaped much of his work.
That matters because Power Ballad is not a detour for Carney. It sits in a line of music-centered films that includes Once, Sing Street, Begin Again and Flora and Son. His breakout 2006 indie film Once won an Oscar, and the new project again leans on the mix of songs, longing and personal reinvention that has become his signature. This time the frame is a music comedy centered on ’80s and ’90s hits, boy-band fame and songwriter rivalry.
The tension in Power Ballad is baked into its premise. What starts as a shared creative moment between Rick and Danny becomes a dispute over authorship and ownership when Rick realizes the song has escaped him and found a much bigger stage. Carney said the sort of man who inspired Rick is the kind who leaves a writer with questions, including when he decided he was “okay with not being Bono.”
For Rudd, the release gives him a starring turn in a film that blends comedy with resentment and nostalgia, while Jonas plays against the easy shine of pop stardom. With tickets available now and the theatrical run beginning May 29, the film’s next test is whether that clash of wounded pride and musical memory lands with audiences the way it did at SXSW.
