Power Ballad review – Nick Jonas and Paul Rudd star in terrific comedy of bromance and betrayal

Irish writer-director John Carney brilliantly brings together Rudd’s washed up wedding-singer and Jonas’s insecure ex-boyband superstar

Once again, Irish writer-director John Carney delivers an aspartame rush of enjoyment with this terrific comedy of bromance and betrayal in the world of music, starring Nick Jonas (from the Jonas Brothers) as Danny Wilson, a preeningly insecure ex-boyband superstar trying to go solo and searching for a hit single, and Paul Rudd as Rick Power, a washed up wedding-singer who rashly plays Danny a catchy song he’s been working on.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure. For every star there is an invisible army of losers, the sad cases who used to be the star’s home town friends or early collaborators and have a lifelong task ahead of them coming to terms with not making it. In the bitter words of Les McQueen, rhythm guitarist for failed 70s group Crème Brulee on TV’s The League of Gentlemen: “It’s a shit business …”