At one point in Power Ballad, the latest music-focused film from director John Carney, a record executive tells a fading boy band star, played by Nick Jonas, not to worry about plagiarism accusations from a little-known singer, played by Paul Rudd. After all, he says, “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.”
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While Carney’s movie is aimed at a wide audience, that line is going to resonate with a very specific subset of them: music lawyers. It’s a legendary axiom of the trade going back decades — the idea being that if you get popular enough in the music business, somebody is eventually going to sue you for a cut.
“Anything to get lawyers laughing at the cinema,” Carney jokes while speaking with Billboard about Power Ballad, which hits theaters nationwide this Friday (June 5).
Like all his films, Power Ballad mines human drama from the world of music. The critically-adored Once (2007) showed the power of music to heal and connect people; his Sing Street (2016) used it to anchor a coming-of-age story. This time, Carney’s found his story in a type of conflict that the music industry has come to know all too well in recent years.
