Sing Street is laden with melodramatic elements: a marriage disintegrating against the background of a national economic crisis, a vicious priest who beats up a boy, a wayward teenage girl with an institutionalized mother and a sexually abusive father, even a reckless emigration on a leaky motorboat. But the movie that houses them is playful, offhanded, exuberant, and infectiously optimistic.
Sing Street is about teenagers whose circumstances ought to be sucking the life out of them but who are just too full of raw energy, enthusiasm, and talent to be laid low. If you don’t like it, you might not have a heart.
Set in Dublin in 1985, Sing Street is about the formation of a pop-rock group—which comes into existence for no better reason than a kid needs a reason to keep talking to a beautiful girl. His name is Conor, he’s 15, and he’s been consigned to a violent inner-city school because his parents are going broke. After a week of hazing by bullies and mistreatment by the school’s principal, Conor is leaving school when he sees 16-year-old Raphina standing on a stoop and impulsively asks her to star in the video his band is making on Saturday.
There is no video. There is no band. So Conor hurriedly assembles a bunch of outlier kids, and they name their band after the location of their school, Synge Street. This is writer-director John Carney’s homage to John Millington Synge, the great Dublin playwright whose effort to bring naturalism to the portrayal of ordinary life in Ireland in The Playboy of the Western World resulted in nationalist riots upon its premiere in 1907. Like Synge, Carney has taken it as his mission to capture the Irish quotidian and elevate it into poetry. His glorious 2007 breakthrough film, Once, is about a brokenhearted busker and his Eastern European muse, who come together almost by accident to write and record some beautiful songs as they wander through the streets of Dublin.
Once is about adults trying to make something of their lives; Sing Street is about teenagers saving theirs. For it turns out that Sing Street is really, really good. The band’s songs, which Carney cowrote with Gary Clark, are a mishmash of 1980s MTV pop—some Duran Duran here, some Cure there, a little Joe Jackson, a dash of New Romantics.
Each new song, influenced by that week’s offerings on the hit show Top of the Pops, occasions a new band style, as the boys cycle through glam and pop and punk. And of course, there are the videos, filmed with a camcorder by a kid who doesn’t know how to use one—but which come out looking no worse than the nonsense that filled MTV’s airwaves in its first five years.
The love story that propels the movie is a trifle wan and suffers from the movie’s casting mismatch. Raphina, the girl of Conor’s dreams, is not especially interesting—and Lucy Boynton, who plays her, looks 15 years older than Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, who plays Conor. She seems more like his babysitter than his potential girlfriend. That said, Lucy Boynton is such a knockout she bids fair to be the next major movie ingénue (after Margot Robbie and Alicia Vikander).
The other problem is that Walsh-Peelo has a great voice and real poise. This shouldn’t be anything but good for the movie, but he makes Conor seem like such a winner from the moment you first see him that you never really believe he’s the bullied and ignored victim of adult neglect and hostility Carney needs him to be for the movie to deliver the emotional wallop he wants.
Sing Street never really gets you that way. The social, political, and personal woes it depicts come to seem like the orchestrations—realistic invocations of a place and time but all in the background. The film’s pleasures, and they are many, all come from joy: the joy of teenagers romping, performing, loving, and living without a filter.
Maybe that’s why the movie’s best song is called “Drive It Like You Stole It.”
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
