• Power Ballad opens in limited release May 29 and expands wide June 5, directed by John Carney (Once, Sing Street)
• Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, an American living in Dublin who leads a wedding band called the Bride and Groove; Nick Jonas plays Danny Wilson, a former boy bander making his solo debut
• The plot: Rick and Danny bond at a late-night jam session, Danny steals Rick’s chorus, the song becomes a hit, and Rick heads to Los Angeles for recognition — or revenge
• SXSW critics cheered the film’s feel-good comedy vibe; Mashable called it “a far echo” from Carney’s best work; Collider gave it an 8/10 in their summer preview
• Full cast: Havana Rose Liu, Jack Reynor, Peter McDonald, Sophie Vavasseur, Beth Fallon, Marcella Plunkett — and Jonas is heading straight from this to Camp Rock 3

The setup sounds like a pitch someone wrote on a napkin at a music industry party, and they probably did: Paul Rudd as a washed-up wedding singer, Nick Jonas as the untouchable pop prince who steals his song, and a road trip to Los Angeles for justice. Director John Carney — the man who made Once — is behind the camera.

Whether that combination delivers is the question critics can’t agree on. Power Ballad opens Thursday in limited release, with a wide expansion on June 5, and the conversation around it has been running hot since its SXSW premiere.

The Film

Rudd’s character, Rick Power, came to Dublin from America fifteen years ago on tour with his rock band. He met a woman, stayed, had a daughter, and gradually made peace with a quieter version of the dream. Now he fronts a wedding band called the Bride and Groove, playing covers at receptions and keeping his own songs mostly to himself.

One wedding gig changes everything. Rick and Danny Wilson (Jonas) end up in a late-night jam session that both men walk away from feeling genuinely good about — a rare moment of real connection between two musicians from completely different worlds. Then Danny releases a solo single. It’s built around a chorus Rick wrote and played for him that night. It’s a number one hit.

What Carney does with Rick’s reaction is the film’s most interesting move: he doesn’t make Rick furious. He makes him hopeful. Rick believes he just needs to find Danny, have a conversation, get his credit or his check. It’s only when Danny’s snarling manager, Mac Darling (Jack Reynor), starts actively blocking every approach that Rick and his chaotic best friend Sandy (Peter McDonald) pack their bags for Los Angeles.

Hollywood hijinks ensue, as Mashable put it — though not everyone found the hijinks particularly funny.

What Critics Are Saying

SXSW was warm. Collider, which got an exclusive first-look image ahead of release, gave the film an 8/10 and placed it firmly in Carney’s lineage of music-driven stories that find emotion in the gap between who people wanted to be and who they became. “A tale rooted in the disparity between the music of yesteryear and the music of today,” their preview noted, pointing to the broader dynamic between Rick’s analog sincerity and Danny’s polished pop machine.

Mashable was less convinced. Their review, which ran the same day as the film’s wide publicity push, called it “a warmly silly movie with a big heart, an appreciation of music, and a happy ending” — and then spent most of its word count explaining why that wasn’t quite enough. “Power Ballad itself never ignites, or even sizzles. Its flame is squelched before it begins.”

The core complaint: the film promises a real showdown between a busted has-been and a pop prince, and then backs away from anything that might actually sting. “For a film that is centered on someone who is undeniably angry, Power Ballad is weirdly toothless.”

The Nick Jonas Question

Here’s where things get genuinely interesting. According to Mashable, the film splits its lead actors cleanly down the middle — and not in the way the marketing suggests.

Rudd throws himself into the comedy. He is, as ever, the most committed guy in any room, and his physical work here is reportedly enthusiastic. The problem, per Mashable, is that his singing sounds processed — potentially autotune-enhanced — which undercuts the film’s entire argument about musical authenticity. A wedding singer who can’t convince you he’s actually singing is a real structural problem.

Jonas, meanwhile, flips that equation entirely. “Jonas can sing the hell out of these pop songs. But when it comes to the comedy, he’s as wooden as the acoustic guitar Danny gifts to Rick.”

It’s the kind of critical observation that lodges in your brain. Two actors, each strong in exactly the category where the other falls short, paired in a film that needs both of them to work at once.

The Carney Comparison

Power Ballad is the fourth time Carney has told a version of this story — music as the thing that connects people across distances they couldn’t otherwise cross — and the fourth time critics have measured it against the one that started everything.

Once came out in 2007. It cost almost nothing. It starred Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová as two musicians falling in love on the streets of Dublin, shot in early digital with a scrappiness that felt like a feature rather than a limitation. The soundtrack won an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The film launched a real band and eventually a Broadway adaptation. “That movie felt like magic,” Mashable’s review noted, and the line lands not as nostalgia but as a measuring stick.

Sing Street in 2016 earned nearly the same affection. Both films had something Power Ballad, by most accounts, doesn’t quite find: the sense that no one but Carney could have made this exact movie, about these exact people, right now.

Begin Again, Flora and Son, and now Power Ballad are the other Carney films — the ones that are pleasant and musical and easy to watch, but that “lean into tedious Hollywood tropes about love and music,” as Mashable’s review put it. The SXSW crowd disagreed. The film is 98 minutes and ends happily. Audiences who turn up for Paul Rudd in a feel-good comedy will probably leave satisfied.

What’s Next for Nick Jonas

Collider’s piece noted something that reframes the entire Power Ballad release: Jonas is heading from this directly into Camp Rock 3. The detail adds an odd meta-layer to a film already about a former boy bander trying to prove he’s more than his past. Jonas is, in fact, a former boy bander trying to prove he’s more than his past. Whether that casting is irony or genius probably depends on how charitable you’re feeling toward the third act.

For what it’s worth, the full cast also includes Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms), Sophie Vavasseur (Flora and Son), Beth Fallon, and Marcella Plunkett as Rick’s wife — a group of actors that, on paper, should have had more room to breathe than the film apparently gave them.

Power Ballad opens May 29 in limited release. The wedding band plays on.

The post Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas’s Power Ballad Is in Theaters This Week — SXSW Loved It, Mashable Didn’t, and the Truth Is Somewhere in Between appeared first on Cream.