Sing Street (2016): RockNRoll Fantasy

Looking for an appealing movie with a pick-me-up ending? A little romance fueled by youthful rocknroll. perhaps?  The new teen movie, Sing Street, is a variant of the classic “Let’s start a band” story, set in Dublin in 1985. This particular version delivers, for the most part. It may be aimed at the young, but I found it fun and invigorating, and I’m not in that demographic (not even close).  It's not quite a classic like The Commitments (1991), yet this movie has its pleasures, including some surprisingly nifty music. Sing Street was written and directed by John Carney, whose previous pictures include the marvelous Once (2007) and the lovely Begin Again (2013), so this should not come as a surprise.

The story is about a boy named Conor, who is forced by circumstances to make some life changing decisions. He’s 15, which is bad enough.  Things are increasingly miserable at home - his  family’s finances have gone to hell; his live-at-home older brother is a college dropout, unemployed, discontented, smoking weed in his room, listening to a treasury of rock albums; his unhappy parents are struggling to make ends meet, quarrelling constantly,  and paying so little attention to Conor, he feels they don’t understand him or care. Their money issues have forced Conor’s transfer from a toney, academic school to a more affordable, but much rougher place (Synge Street Christian Brothers School), where priests rule and emphasize obedience over learning, a place where Conor knows no one, gets bullied by assholes and feels like a misfit. His world has become a dark place.   

The clouds start to lift when young Conor meets a girl –  intimidatingly pretty, sophisticated, certainly out of his league, but oh so desirable. Her name is Raphina (Lucy Boynton) and she’s a model, she says. He tells her he’s in a band, and asks if she’d like to be in a video they’re making. To his surprise and delight, she agrees.The only problem: Conor doesn’t have a band.  Duly motivated, however, he sets about forming one, and his story takes off.

It’s tempting to suggest that Sing Street, taken together with Once and Begin Again, form a kind of trilogy for writer/director Carney, as all three movies are about young people whose lives are transformed by, and in the process of making, music. The difference is that the protagonists of the earlier movies were musicians in their twenties, with some tough life experience under their belts, struggling to find success in the music biz, and finding themselves (and love) in the process. In Sing Street, on the other hand, Conor, is both very young and quite innocent when we meet him. His band (called Sing Street, after the school) starts out as but a means to an end: that being to impress Raphina. In the process, however, Conor (now known as Cosmo) and his mates get caught up in the power of their rock and roll creations, gain confidence in themselves and, well, grow up.  

Carney’s work reminds me a bit of Richard Curtis (writer of Four Weddings and A Funeral, Love Actually, Notting Hill, and other love-centric movies), because this guy truly believes in the enchantment of romance and the power of pop music to express it. His movies are exhilarating and sweet. For Carney, as with Curtis, falling in love grants us a renewed youthful innocence, it’s a state of grace. In Cosmo’s case this is his first love and the innocence of his desire is palpable. There’s nothing carnal about it, he wants to hold Raphina, to kiss her lips, to be with her.   As in the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

In Sing Street, Carney is aided greatly by his lead actor, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo.  This kid is quite a find. Sometimes he looks like the adolescent he is, at other times like the young rock star he’s trying to be.  His charisma and earnest enthusiasm make him quite watchable. Walsh-Peelo and the music (penned by Carney) carry the movie. The tunes are catchy and the teen-specific lyrics (“I gotta find out who I’m meant to be; I don’t believe in destiny”) appropriately relate to the narrative. Along the way, we watch Cosmo trying on different mid-eighties rock looks, the big hair and eye makeup of The Cure’s Robert Smith for example, as he and his mates search for their own identities.

The other band members are also good, especially Darren (Ben Carolan), another outsider, who becomes Conor/Cosmo’s first friend at school and then the band’s manager/publicist; and Eamon (Mark McKenna), a multically talented acquaintance of Darren, who becomes Cosmo’s songwriting partner. Jack Reynor (Macbeth [2015]) is memorable as Conor’s troubled older brother Brendan, his musical muse and philosophical mentor.  Lucy Boynton, another newcomer,  does a nice job as Raphina, although the role is underdeveloped. Aiden Gillen (Game of Thrones) is Conor’s dad and, in a cool bit of casting, Maria Doyle Kennedy (who was Natalie, one of the back-up singers in The Commitments) is his mom.

One could pick some nits with the picture – Boynton, nearly six years older than Walsh-Peelo, is too old for the part and for him, the band comes together way too easily, etc. – but at its core,Sing Street is a likeable fantasy. It’s a world where race does not matter, humble origins do not matter, and if you really want it, if you try hard, if you believe, just clap your hands: and not only will Tinker Bell live, but you can get instruments, amplifiers, and cool clothes; you’ll quickly be musically proficient, original tunes and meaningful lyrics will flow forth - in short, you will succeed. This is reassuring and very sweet, which is why we eat it up.

I did, anyway.

106 minutes.

In wide release.