‘Sing Street’ is the High Note of the John Carney Canon
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-related topics.
Just about a decade ago, I was on a flight looking for something to watch when I came across a film called Sing Street. A musical drama, it said. I didn’t recognize any of the names of the cast or crew. It had just come out that year, but I didn’t remember seeing any press for it. The tagline really stood out to me: “Boy meets girl. Girl unimpressed. Boy starts band.” Simple, to the point—I liked it. I decided to give it a watch to pass the time.
That ended up being the first of many, many times I watched writer/director John Carney’s personal, heartfelt Dublin-set musical dramedy, which was also my introduction to the filmmaker’s work in general. It was the beginning of a cinematic journey that I did not take alone. As soon as the film ended, I nudged my older brother and said something to the effect of: “You gotta see this one movie. It’ll change your life, I swear.” Two hours later, he nudged me back to say he loved it. And just like that, we were converts of the church of Carney.
The Music is the Story
As we delved deeper into his body of work, we realized that Sing Street was hardly a one-off in terms of genre or subject matter within his filmography. Music of a certain earnestness has always been a big part, perhaps the main part, of his storytelling identity. Although it was no surprise to me that my brother connected strongly with this aspect of Carney’s films, I was almost shocked to find myself as emotionally invested as I was. While he tends to prefer the sort of music and writing Carney incorporates that very much wears its heart on its sleeve, I rather staunchly reserve my ears for the sort of unsentimental art whose sleeves are too long and oversized to have room for that level of sincerity.
But it’s a testament to the purity and authenticity of Carney’s work that it always manages to break through my almost willful closed-mindedness in this respect. His debut feature Once, a humble low-budget film following a busker (Glen Hansard) and a musician (Markéta Irglová) as their chance meeting turns into a musical journey around Dublin, has to be the purest example of his particular blend of the cinematic and the musical. The film’s raw and authentic presentation of songwriting and musical collaboration is part of what earned it a great deal of attention and acclaim, putting Carney squarely on the map.
So it followed that, seven years later, he returned with something of the relative scale and polish of Begin Again. Carney’s sophomore effort follows young singer-songwriter Greta (Keira Knightley) and washed-up, struggling music business executive Dan (Mark Ruffalo) as they work together to create an album of live performances in different parts of Manhattan, figuring out their personal relationships in the process. Although its clear budgetary blessings provided it a particular sheen compared to Once, Carney’s mastery of music as a device for characterization and narrative remained very much intact and perhaps even elevated. Greta’s songs are extensions of herself, and Dan brings a bit of himself to their realization.
In a standout scene near the beginning of the film, Dan imagines an entire supporting arrangement for Greta’s song “Step You Can’t Take Back” the first time he sees her as she plays it alone at a bar they find themselves in. Later, Dan’s teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld) finally finds her confidence over the course of improvising her first guitar solo, awkwardly stumbling through it at first but finding the rhythm and the groove over time. The music tells the story, and, ultimately, is the story.
Making Sense through Song
Carney swiftly followed that up with a return to Dublin in Sing Street. The film is still, for me, his best work, and it’s not just because it was the first of his I’d seen. Set in the ‘80s, it follows young Conor Lalor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) as he deals with moving to a new, harsher, public Catholic school as his family runs into financial troubles. He meets a mysterious aspiring model named Raphina (Lucy Boynton), falls properly in love, and forms a band with some new schoolmates to impress her. Conor and the band get better and better at writing songs for Raphina while he deals with domestic family issues and bullies both in his aggressive live-wire schoolmate Barry (Ian Kenny) and the school’s strict and traditional principal Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley).
The story isn’t particularly groundbreaking on paper, but Carney brings to his third theatrical feature the most potent examples of what makes him feel uniquely authentic within his cinematic space—this time expanding his scope by interrogating multiple distinct dimensions of what music can mean to his characters, beginning with how it can create a distinct sense of time and place.
The Dublin Carney depicts here, likely a rather personal view of the time and city he grew up in, is infested with the glitzy rock and pop of England and America, lands which, for kids like Conor, seem like the places to be. The city is filled with people who want to get out of there, who watch Duran Duran’s “Rio” music video on TV and dream of being right there with them. For Conor’s willfully slacking and home-ridden older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor), this music is his escape, a chance to vicariously live the fast-paced, rock and roll life he once envisioned for himself and a distraction from the reality of his perceived wasted potential. Conor and Brendan’s close yet somehow distant brotherhood is just one of a few central relationships Carney sketches, and it is anchored by this perspective on music—that Brendan’s personal music “school” for Conor both brings them together and tears them apart, with the music signaling the past for Brendan and the future for Conor.
Another significant relationship in the film is between Conor and his lead guitarist and songwriting partner, the multi-talented and ever aloof Eamon (Mark McKenna).The process of writing and developing songs continued to be a throughline of Carney’s filmography. Though not quite ever returning to the visceral verité aesthetic of his debut, his experience as a songwriter allowed him to give uncreative folk like myself a glimpse into what it’s like to create a musical expression of yourself, and to share that experience with someone else. In Sing Street, Eamon is a young man of few words, unless we’re talking about rabbit stuff. But as he and Conor write more songs together, they begin to share the same wavelength, understanding each other without words. They eventually get to a point where, whenever Conor doesn’t know how to deal with what life throws at him, he knows he can ring Eamon’s doorbell, no matter the time, and he’d help him find a way to make sense of it through song. For Carney, a character dynamic like this can be established and developed almost entirely through songwriting scenes.
Often, and inevitably, those songs were about love. Another, perhaps the important relationship for Conor is of course with Raphina, and Carney uses his musical progression during the film to communicate the growing depth of his love for her. The music that surrounds you means something. The process of writing music means something. But what about the songs themselves? Carney’s shown us what it’s like to write a song, but how about what it means to write one for someone? Every song Conor writes, he writes for Raphina, and his writing mirrors the stages of his relationship with her over the course of the film. With the rough yet danceable “The Riddle of the Model”, he’s infatuated with someone he barely knows yet. “Up” introduces a sensitivity and a weight to his connection with her, though still as only an idyllic light in his life. It’s not until “Drive It Like You Stole It” and “To Find You” that Conor demonstrates that what it really means to love someone is to fully understand them and their pain. Their love story feels real and satisfying because Conor’s songs appropriately accompany its narrative beats.
The Riddle of the Movies
In the decade since Sing Street’s release, I wouldn’t say Carney’s reached the heights of his earlier work from the first decade of his career. Apple’s charming mother-son dramedy Flora and Son starring Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the anthological Amazon series Modern Love and even the newly released Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas starrer Power Ballad all somewhat lack the quality in writing and, in the case of the films, original music that the filmmaker’s first three features had in spades. But it speaks to the unique sensibility Carney possesses that those projects still managed to be largely enjoyable and emotionally affecting at the right moments, even for a cynical fart like me.
Five feature films in, the writer/director can boast a track record that, at least for most, can guarantee the next project his name is attached to will be good at the very least. Still, here’s hoping we get another Sing Street somewhere down the line.