John Carney has spent most of his career circling the messy overlap between music, ambition, and the lives people build around songs. “Power Ballad” will take that familiar terrain and push it toward something meaner and more comic, pairing Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas as two men whose shared love of music curdles into rivalry once success enters the picture. The film had its world premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival on March 1 and will make its North American premiere at SXSW on March 14 before opening in theaters on June 5.
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The setup is sharp and simple. Rudd plays Rick, a past-his-prime wedding singer who meets Jonas’ fading boy-band star Danny during a gig, and the two connect over a late-night jam session. But when Danny turns one of Rick’s songs into the hit that revives his career, Rick goes looking for the credit he thinks is his, even if the chase starts to blow up the parts of his life that still matter. SXSW’s synopsis calls it a story about music, self-respect, friendship, and the price of ambition, which sounds like exactly the kind of bittersweet hook Carney has always known how to play.
What makes the movie especially intriguing is that Carney is not just revisiting the “Once” or “Sing Street” lane here. “Power Ballad” looks built around resentment, authorship, and the ugly side of creative communion—the moment when collaboration starts to feel like theft. That premise gives Rudd a strong comic-dramatic lane to work in, while Jonas gets to play a performer whose comeback may be built on somebody else’s buried talent.
The ensemble around them includes Jack Reynor, Havana Rose Liu, Peter McDonald, and Marcella Plunkett. Carney co-wrote the screenplay with McDonald, while the music is credited to Gary Clark and Carney, which should be enough to get attention on its own, given how central songs have always been to Carney’s films. SXSW lists the project in its Narrative Spotlight section with a 98-minute runtime.
Lionsgate will release “Power Ballad” in theaters on June 5, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
