Power Ballad Review: Paul Rudd Soars, One Song Falls Short

Power Ballad, John Carney’s new musical comedy starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, reaches wide release on June 5 after a strong festival run that began in Dublin. The story follows a wedding singer whose original song gets swiped by a fading pop star, and it has landed an 87 percent critics’ rating; yet the one thing that should be bulletproof in a Carney film, the song itself, is the thing reviewers cannot agree on.

That disagreement is the whole game. The movie asks you to believe a single track could yank a washed-up singer back onto the charts. Whether you buy the film depends on whether you buy the tune, and on that question the reviews split clean down the middle.

The First Act Lands Every Punch

Rudd plays Rick Power, a wedding-band frontman who once dreamed of arena stages and settled, happily enough, for a good marriage and a well-adjusted kid. He plays other people’s classic rock for newlyweds, and it scratches the old itch, barely. Then he runs into Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), an alumnus of a long-dead boy band, the two get drunk, and they start tinkering with half-finished songs.

That stretch is the strongest run of filmmaking Carney has shipped in years. Rudd can do almost anything on screen, and the director’s instinct for the slow assembly of a song, two people fumbling their way toward the right riff, has never been sharper. You don’t need to play guitar to enjoy watching it happen. This is the sweet spot Carney found in Once and Sing Street, the unglamorous mechanics of writing music shot like they matter.

Jonas is fine in the part, never more than that, but the chemistry between the two men carries the early reels. Peter McDonald, who co-wrote the script with Carney and also turns up as one of Rick’s bandmates, gives those bar scenes a loose, lived-in feel.

Can One Song Carry the Whole Premise?

Danny pockets one of their collaborations. When his label demands a hit or threatens to drop him, he releases the stolen track, “How to Write a Song (Without You),” and his dead career roars back. Rick then hears his own melody on the radio, sung by the man he trusted.

From there, the whole movie is a bet on that one song. It has to read on screen as a genuine, culture-saturating smash, or the plot has no engine. Some critics heard exactly that.

an endearingly sappy, insanely catchy earworm

So wrote Angie Han, film critic at The Hollywood Reporter, who heard the kind of wedding-playlist hit the story requires. Plenty of others didn’t. To them the track is pleasant and well-built, the sort of thing you nod along to on an album and forget by the parking lot. That is a perfectly good song. The script needs a once-in-a-decade hook, and to those ears this isn’t one. Power Ballad turns song theft into something gentle and comic; the real disputes over who owns a piece of music are far uglier, as a recent Supreme Court ruling on music piracy liability made clear.

Gary Clark’s Quiet Fingerprints on the Score

Here is the detail most reviews skate past. The songs were written by Carney with Gary Clark, the Scottish musician who fronted the 1980s band Danny Wilson and penned its one enduring hit, “Mary’s Prayer,” a UK number three in 1988. With that pedigree on the credits, the music was never going to be the weak link, whatever you make of the centerpiece track.

Clark has been Carney’s writing partner before. The two worked together on 2023’s Flora and Son, and you can trace Gary Clark’s long songwriting career from pop stardom through credits with Natalie Imbruglia and Lloyd Cole to the films.

Then there is the in-joke buried in the casting. Nick Jonas’s faded pop star is named Danny Wilson. So was Clark’s band, itself christened after the 1952 Frank Sinatra picture Meet Danny Wilson, a story you can read in full in this interview about the 1980s band Danny Wilson. Drop a real ex-pop-star into a role named after a real songwriter’s first group, with that songwriter writing the music, and coincidence stops being a believable explanation. Once you clock it, it becomes the film’s slyest gag.

Where the Middle Goes Slack

The premise is rock solid; the second act is where the picture loses its thread. Once the song is stolen, the script isn’t sure what it wants Rick to do. Hunt Danny down and force a confession? Let Danny stew in his own guilt? It gestures at both and commits to neither, and the energy of those early scenes quietly drains away.

Rick’s bandmates, a group of Irish musicians with real personality, pick up some of the slack and give the middle some texture. His wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), gets far less. When a serious strain hits their marriage late on, it feels engineered by the plot’s need for a third-act problem rather than by anything the characters earned.

How Power Ballad Sits in the Carney Songbook

Every John Carney film rests on its songs, which is exactly why expectations here run so high. The catalog makes the pattern plain.

Set against that run, a merely good song reads as a shortfall, because Carney has trained his audience to expect a tune they cannot shake. Music-driven storytelling is everywhere just now, from a stage musical of Trainspotting to these small, sincere movies, and the bar Carney set for himself is unusually high. The other films cleared it with a song you left the cinema humming. This one asks you to take the hit on faith. You also get a glimpse of Clark’s Oscar-shortlisted work on Flora and Son in how carefully these tracks are built.

A Modest Opening Before the Wide Push

Lionsgate opened the film in select theaters on May 29 and pushes it nationwide on June 5, with the official Power Ballad release calendar confirming the rollout. The early numbers are small: roughly $467,000 from its limited run, the kind of soft start a word-of-mouth title needs the wide weekend to fix.

• 87% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 7.3/10 average across 90 critics
• 65 on Metacritic from 27 reviews, in the “generally favorable” band
• $467,000 in limited-release box office ahead of the nationwide expansion

At a tight 98 minutes, the film never wears out its welcome, and the maturity of its storytelling is genuinely hard to shake. The gimmick is bulletproof; the song that has to sell it is only good, and a Carney movie has rarely needed you to love a tune this badly to forgive everything around it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Power Ballad based on a true story?

No. It is an original screenplay by John Carney and Peter McDonald, who also plays one of the band members. The stolen-song plot is fiction, though the music industry’s habit of recycling old demos gives it a believable spine.

Who wrote the songs in the film?

Carney wrote the music with Gary Clark, the Scottish musician behind Danny Wilson’s 1988 hit “Mary’s Prayer.” The pair previously collaborated on Flora and Son, and Clark is also the film’s executive music producer.

Where can I watch Power Ballad?

In theaters. Lionsgate opened the film in select cities on May 29 and expanded it nationwide in early June. No streaming or home-release date has been announced yet.

Is it worth watching?

Critics mostly say yes; the film holds an 87 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. The first act and Paul Rudd’s performance draw the strongest praise, while the saggy midsection is the most common complaint.

How long is the film and where did it premiere?

It runs 98 minutes and premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival on March 1, 2026, before its theatrical rollout.