There’s a pleasing circularity in Jack Reynor’s involvement in POWER BALLAD. The Irish-American actor first worked with John Carney in Sing Street, the 2016 Dublin-set coming-of-age musical in which he played the older brother whose own failed musical ambitions shadow the film’s young protagonist — a role that won him an IFTA for Best Supporting Actor. A decade on, Reynor is back in Carney’s orbit, this time as Mac, the slick LA-based music manager whose instinct to protect a client’s commercial interests sets the film’s second-act conflict in motion. It’s a neat bit of casting for anyone paying attention, and Reynor — who has spent the intervening years building a genuinely varied career across Ari Aster’s folk-horror MIDSOMAR, Amazon’s sci-fi series The PERIPHERAL, and the Netflix murder mystery THE PERFECT COUPLE — brings real sharpness to a role that could easily have been thankless villainy. Mac isn’t the villain exactly, just the most pragmatic person in the room, and that’s a more interesting thing to play.

Power Ballad is, in many ways, the most commercially minded film Carney has made. The director has carved out something close to a unique niche — intimate, music-driven stories shot through with Dublin feeling and a faith in the redemptive properties of a good song. ONCE remains the high watermark, a near-perfect small film that somehow felt like both a demo reel and a masterpiece. SING STREET and BEGIN AGAIN found their audiences too, the former especially earning a devoted following for its infectious exuberance. POWER BALLAD widens the lens considerably: this is a transatlantic production built around two charismatic, bankable leads in Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, and it has the feel of a film that wants to be liked by as many people as possible.