Totally in tune

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This article was published 13/05/2016 (3788 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mom and dad are fighting in the opening scene of this sweet, funny musical coming-of-age drama. In his teenage bedroom, 14-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) plays his guitar and transforms his parents’ screaming match into song, gently riffing on phrases like, “If we didn’t share a mortgage, I’d leave you right now.”

As with Irish writer-director John Carney’s debut film, the indie charmer Once (2007), Sing Street believes that music has the power to save your life — or, at the very least, get you through the near-fatal awkwardness and confusion of adolescence in 1980s Dublin.

With a downturn in the Irish economy, Conor’s middle-class parents (Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen and the ever wonderful Maria Doyle Kennedy of Orphan Black) are cash-strapped. Everyone in the house is wearing three or four sweaters to cut the gas bill.

More crucially, Conor’s education has been downgraded from a Jesuit institution to a rough neighbourhood school run by the Christian Brothers— with their “fine educational tradition of beating their students,” as his stoner brother Brendan (Jack Reynor) puts it.

In the prison-yard atmosphere of his new school, Conor’s posh accent and non-regulation brown shoes make him a magnet for bullies, students and staff alike. Meanwhile, things at home are increasingly tense and unhappy.

Conor finds a lifeline when he invents a band to impress the beautiful Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a would-be model with a fabulous New Wave perm. When she volunteers to be in Conor’s entirely theoretical music video, he suddenly has to start making music for real.

Following Conor and a bunch of working-class middle-school misfits as they do that “let’s put a band together” thing, Carney manages to be hopeful, wistful, comic and melancholy at the same time. His deep affection for his sweet, hapless characters is matched by his real feel for ’80s pop music.

In one scene, Conor’s family has gathered in the living room to watch music videos — still a relatively novel form — on TV.

“The perfect mixture of music and visuals,” declares Brendan. “What tyranny could stand up to that?” The comic irony is that they’re watching Duran Duran, a group not exactly known for its tyranny-toppling powers.

And that’s OK. Carney generously mixes up the cool and the uncool, the bands that make you want to change the world and the ones that just make you want to change your hair. He catches, beautifully, that mood of adolescence, as the kids try things on, cycling through musical and sartorial influences from A-ha to Culture Club to the Cure in an attempt to find their way.

Carney likes to use the creative musical process to drive his stories. At first, Conor is daunted by his lack of musical experience, but as Brendan says, “Did the Sex Pistols know how to play? Who are you, Steely Dan?” Of course, in fine movie-musical fashion, the band is soon turning out tight original tunes.

The romance sometimes flirts with cliché. Raphina seems impossibly mature and together, more like a dorky-boy fantasy projection than a girl with problems of her own. But the performances of the young leads are grounded in an easy naturalism, and the musical sequences, in particular, are packed with moments of pure physical joy.

Sing Street isn’t as scrappy as Once, but it feels more genuine than Carney’s recycled Begin Again (2014). At its best, this is an absolute darling of a movie, offering a tender and rueful look at the intensity of youth, when love and music are practically inseparable.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca