The Montrose Music Festival is in town this weekend. Last year, two friends of mine, who work at the Playhouse, performed on the Sunday afternoon outside the rugby club in the broad sunlight. Various bands and solo artists showcase each year on the ground floor of the Playhouse. In one of those strange coincidences, a film unconnected to Montrose but relevant to amateur musicians has just opened upstairs. A story about a pair of white men singing baleful love songs aimed at the teen-age-girl market doesn’t promise much. And yet “Power Ballad” (Lionsgate), showing now, raises many timely concerns about plagiarism and intellectual-property theft.
Rick is the lead singer for “Bride and Groove (grooviest wedding band),” who perform songs from the “late eighties possibly early nineties” at Irish wedding receptions. They are invited to a huge country house (someone in the band calls it Downton Abbey). Rick hankers to play his own songs. One has the lyrics “If you wanna run/I’ll be running right at your side/I’ll be running ‘til we run out of time/It’s just a matter of time.” The wedding guests don’t like it and leave the dance floor. “Stick to the hits,” the band manager says. “We’re not rock stars, Rick. We’re human jukeboxes.” Ex-boy-band singer Danny, with his “impossibly cute smile—and let’s not talk about that hair!” is there as a guest (“it’s all over social media; he’s in town for the wedding”). He joins “Bride and Groove” onstage for a song. Later that night, Rick, played by Paul Rudd, and Danny, played by Nick Jonas, get drunk and high and compose a song together. Danny returns to Los Angeles and releases the song which is “downloaded five-hundred-million times.” Rick obsesses about being cut out.
“That’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time,” Danny says after singing at the wedding. The film holds the audience’s attention with many fresh, clever asides—a vicar dances to “Celebrate Good Times, Come On”; “the lyrics [of a boy-band song] have to be appropriate so the parents let their kids listen to it”; two teen-age boys steal coins from a busker’s guitar case—outside a Dublin bank; the “Bride and Groove” play at “The Madison Inn” as Danny plays Madison Square Gardens.
But the relentless pressure of the music industry bites. “I have to present my label with some new music,” Danny says to Rick. “You’re, like, a tightrope walker; you have to keep going. The expectations are so high.” A meme added to a clip of the wedding on social media goads him: “Is Danny Wilson fronting a wedding band now?” Danny’s agent, played by an excellent Jack Reynor, who also starred recently in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” which I reviewed in April, rages and snarls and bullies. “You’re eating bugs on a reality-T.V. show,” he says, “right now that’s all I can get you. If you wanna hang onto the home, and all the cars, and the stuff, and me,” he says, “we’re gonna have to dig deep, man.” The label will bank its money before the drinking and parties and ego destroy Danny. The advertising agency promoting Danny’s album erect a ginormous lighted billboard outside his home—he can bow down and worship his money-making prowess twenty-four/seven. It’s about the spectacle and he is, like fabric conditioner or subscriptions to satellite-T.V. packages, just a commodity.
Rick’s fantasising feels embarrassing. Can’t he just move on? But his role is to throw sand into the music-selling machine. As I thought about the musicians making last-minute adjustments for MoFest, I suspected that they would grieve and become furious too if the events of “Power Ballad” happened to them. “Shall we just cut the guy a check?” Danny asks his agent. “You told me to kill it and that’s what we did,” his agent replies. “You don’t want that story coming out. You made the song.” Then he asks a question: “Where do artists get their ideas?” It’s a pity that an answer to this crucial point isn’t developed. In the age of so called Artificial Intelligence—which I hear is used to both compose university essays and mark them; to write commercial bids and award them; and summarised my review of “Nuremberg” from November using text and opinions from two other media outlets, not what the Playhouse published—this would be a great movie. The agent thinks Danny is the “genius.” This word is often applied to white men who make a lot of money.
Rick’s daughter, played by Beth Fallon, is in the target market for Danny’s music. Miss Fallon skirts the stroppy-teen-ager stereotype with ease. All her scenes are convincing. She slams her dad’s work. “It’s music your mum would listen to,” she says. “Women aren’t lonely any more, and we’re not interested in falling in love either.” “What are you interested in?” Rick asks. “Revenge,” she replies. The maleness of “Power Ballad” is its greatest weakness: Sophie Vavasseur and Havana Rose Liu serve merely as Rick’s Dutiful Wife and Danny’s Gorgeous Girlfriend. Still, compared with the tedious, over-scripted movie “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” which I reviewed in June 2025, “Power Ballad” is deeper, more compact, more anxiety-provoking, and more self-aware. The original music is good; Mr Rudd has the better diction and Mr Jonas the enviable falsetto.
The hazy evening whose outcome is the contested song goes well. “You’re not just some boy-band guy,” Rick says. “Tell my label that,” Danny says. “They don’t think that?” Rick says. “They’re idiots.” Danny makes Rick a gift of one of his stash of acoustic guitars, a Gibson J-200, the “Jumbo.” “What a great kid!” Rick says.
Adam Poole
29th May 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
