Name: Power Ballad
Director: John Carney
Genre: Comedy, Music, Drama
Released: 2026-05-29
Duration: 98 min
Cast: Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Peter McDonald, Marcella Plunkett, Rory Keenan

Every hit song has at least two people convinced they made it alone. John Carney’s new film picks at that wound and refuses to let it close. Rick is a wedding singer whose best years are behind him, working rooms full of strangers who are not there to hear him. Danny is a boy-band star watching his own fame drain away. They meet at a gig, bond over a late-night jam, and then Danny takes one of Rick’s songs and turns it into the hit that resets his whole career. Rick is left holding the authorship and none of the glory.

Carney has built a career on music as rescue, the thing that hauls ordinary people out of small lives and hands them a second chance. Power Ballad treats music as property instead. The film cares less about whether the song is any good than about who gets to stand in front of it, and that single shift turns a warm premise into a grievance. Rick wrote the thing in a back room. Danny sang it on every screen in the country. Neither the law nor the culture has ever agreed on which of them really owns it.

The casting is the loudest argument the film makes before a ticket is sold. Paul Rudd, the most durable nice guy in American comedy, plays a man slowly hollowed out by the conviction that he has been robbed, which tests whether that bottomless likability can carry a character this petty and this wounded. Nick Jonas, a genuine product of the boy-band machine, plays a faded version of exactly what he once was. The film is wagering that the audience walks in knowing his biography and reads Danny through it. It is the kind of casting that does half the screenwriting before a word is spoken.

Carney’s earlier films share a single article of faith, that picking up an instrument with the right stranger can save you. The Dublin buskers of his breakout, the teenager who starts a band to win a girl, the single mother teaching herself guitar over video calls: each one lands on the redemptive charge of the jam session. Power Ballad keeps the jam and then poisons everything that comes after it. The song that pulls Rick and Danny together is the same song that sets them at each other’s throats, which may be the most pointed thing Carney has ever done with his favorite scene.

The argument underneath is one the music business has never settled. The person who performs a song is rarely the only person who made it, and the gap between writing it and singing it is where careers and lawsuits live. Pop runs on that gap. By making a wedding singer the author and a pop star the face, Carney drags the backstage accounting into the daylight. A power ballad is engineered for the cheap seats, built to feel like it belongs to whoever happens to be holding the microphone. The film asks what happens when the person holding the microphone is not the person who wrote the words.

The timing works in its favor. Pop has spent recent seasons arguing in public about precisely this: who owns a master recording, whose name belongs on the writing credit, what an artist is owed for work that made somebody else rich. A film about a songwriter trying to claw back his own song lands in a culture already primed to take a side. Carney does not have to explain the stakes to anyone who has watched those fights spill across awards stages and into courtrooms.

What the film still has to prove is that Carney can stay cruel enough to honor his own premise. His instinct is reconciliation, and his movies tend to forgive almost everyone by the final reel. The logline promises that Rick will risk everything he cares about to reclaim the credit, which is a darker engine than Carney usually runs on. If the third act dissolves that obsession into a hug and a closing duet, the story collapses back into the very comfort it was built to interrogate. The trailer guards its ending and gives away nothing about which way he went.

Paul Rudd plays Rick Power and Nick Jonas plays Danny Wilson, alongside Peter McDonald as Sandy, Marcella Plunkett as Rachel and Rory Keenan as Binzer. Carney writes as well as directs, working again in the music-comedy register that has defined most of his output. The film runs about an hour and forty minutes, tight enough to keep the feud claustrophobic instead of letting it spread out into subplot.

Power Ballad opens in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 29 May and reaches the United States on 5 June, a proper theatrical release rather than a quiet streaming drop. That suits a film about who gets the credit in a crowded room. It wants bodies in the dark, watching two men fight over a song the whole cinema will be humming on the way out. The bet is that Carney’s warmth, paired with a sharper hook than he usually allows himself, can summon the same word-of-mouth crowd that carried his earlier films. On paper it is his most commercial pairing yet. The only open question is whether he was willing to let it hurt.