John Carney basically spends his entire career remaking the exact same movie, but I cannot bring myself to be mad at him for it. Once was the raw, lo-fi version. Begin Again was the bloated Hollywood version with Keira Knightley and Adam Levine trying way too hard. Then in 2016 he hit the exact sweet spot with Sing Street, a film that takes the dreary, soul-crushing grey of 1985 Dublin and injects it with a lethal dose of cheap hair gel and synth-pop. It is a movie about being fifteen, broke, and so stupidly desperate to impress a cool girl that you accidentally form a surprisingly decent new wave band.
The setup is aggressively familiar if you grew up in a house where money was a taboo subject people screamed about behind closed doors. Conor, played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in a performance that hits the exact right notes of teenage awkwardness, is watching his parents' marriage fall apart in real time. The Irish economy in the mid-eighties is in the toilet, so to save cash, his parents yank him out of his comfortable fee-paying school and drop him into Synge Street CBS. It is a terrifying, rundown Christian Brothers school run by a dictatorial priest named Brother Baxter, where the kids are rough, the walls are peeling, and black shoes are mandatory under threat of physical violence.
On his very first day, Conor gets his shoes confiscated, gets beaten up by the school bully Barry, and ends up standing outside in the freezing drizzle wearing bright white socks. But right across the road, leaning against a railing, is Raphina. Played by Lucy Boynton with an incredible amount of fake maturity, huge hair, and heavily layered makeup, she looks like someone who escaped from a higher dimension. Conor walks up to her, panics, lies that he has a band, and asks her to star in their music video. She says yes, which leaves Conor with one small problem: he does not have a band, he does not write music, and he has no idea what he is doing.
What follows is the scrambled, chaotic assembly of the band, and this is where the movie gets genuinely funny in a very specific, observational way. Conor recruits Eamon, a quiet kid who lives with his mom, raises dozens of rabbits in his backyard, and somehow plays every single instrument known to man. They recruit a few other misfits, including a couple of kids who just happen to own instruments, and start writing songs in Eamon's living room.
The genius of how Carney handles the band is that they do not have a defined style. They have whatever style Conor's older brother, Brendan, tells them is cool that week. Jack Reynor plays Brendan, and he is easily the best thing in the entire film. Brendan is a college dropout who spends all day in his bedroom wearing a bathrobe, smoking weed, and treating vinyl records like holy texts. He is bitter, deeply disappointed with his own stalled life, but he adopts Conor as his personal protege. Every time Conor comes home with a new problem, Brendan hands him an album and tells him to listen.
So the band's identity shifts wildly from scene to scene based on whatever record Conor listened to the night before. One day they are ripping off Duran Duran, wearing oversized suits and singing about mysterious girls. The next day Conor listens to The Cure, shows up to school in full black makeup, looking like a wet goth, and writes a track called "A Girl With an Eye" that sounds like a miserable garage demo. Then they discover Joe Jackson and Hall & Oates, shifting into tight, bouncy pop.
It is completely absurd, of course. In real life, a group of teenage boys in 1985 Dublin who just picked up instruments three weeks ago would sound like a bag of cats being thrown down a flight of stairs. They would not be writing "Riddle of the Model" or "Drive It Like You Stole It" in twenty minutes over tea and biscuits. The tracks in this movie are way too polished, way too catchy, and far too well-arranged for a bunch of kids working with a cheap cassette recorder. But you do not care. The movie leans into the fantasy of songwriting so hard, and with so much joy, that you just buy the lie completely.
That line between fantasy and reality is really the core of the whole film. There is a magnificent sequence around the middle of the movie where the band decides to film a high-budget music video in the school gymnasium for their song "Drive It Like You Stole It." Conor pictures the whole thing in his head like a 1950s American prom. He imagines his parents showing up together, happily in love, dancing in synchronization. He imagines Brother Baxter doing backflips in the background, the school bully protecting everyone, and Raphina showing up on a motorcycle like a movie star. But as the camera pans around, the fantasy dissolves, revealing the bleak reality: the gym is mostly empty, his parents never showed up, Raphina is late, and they are just a bunch of dorky kids in terrible costumes dancing in front of a painted backdrop.
It hits hard because anyone who ever tried to make art or do something creative as a kid knows that exact feeling. You have this massive, cinematic vision in your head, and then you look at the footage you actually shot and it is just your buddy standing in an alleyway wearing his mom's coat.
Brendan calls this dynamic "happy sad." He explains to Conor that love and joy are not separate from pain and sadness, especially in Ireland. You cannot have real pop music without a layer of misery underneath it. It is a cynical philosophy, but it is deeply true for the characters. Everyone in Sing Street is trying to escape something. Conor's parents are miserable and broke. Raphina is dealing with a toxic older boyfriend who promises to take her to London but leaves her stranded. Brendan is rotting in his bedroom, realizing that his own youth slipped through his fingers while he watched his family fall apart.
Jack Reynor gives Brendan a tragic weight that prevents the movie from becoming a sugary Disney channel flick. There is a scene near the end where Brendan completely loses his mind on Conor, screaming about how he was the one who took the beatings from their parents first, how he was the pioneer who paved the way so Conor could be the sensitive artist. It is a raw, ugly explosion of jealousy and resentment, but it comes from a place of deep love. He wants Conor to get out because he knows he never will.
By the time the climax arrives, Conor and Raphina decide to make a run for it. They hop into their grandfather's tiny, dilapidated motorboat and head out into the rough, open Irish Sea toward Wales, aiming for London with nothing but a bag of clothes and a demo tape. On a purely logical level, it is an insane ending. In the real world, that tiny boat would probably capsize two miles off the coast, or they would land in Wales, run out of money in three hours, and end up sleeping in a train station.
Yet as a piece of pure thematic storytelling, that ending works brilliantly. Whether they make it or not is beside the point. The point is that they actually had the nerve to push the boat off the dock and leave the grey, dead-end life behind. When Brendan stands on the shore, watching their little boat disappear into the rain and storm, he jumps up and down, screaming with pure euphoria. He didn't make it out, but his little brother did.
Sing Street works because it does not try to pretend that the eighties were a golden era of nostalgia. It acknowledges the poverty, the abusive authority figures, the casual violence, and the claustrophobia of living in a country where everyone felt trapped. But it also captures the miraculous feeling of discovering a great song for the first time, putting on a leather jacket, and pretending to be someone else for three minutes. It is messy, loud, slightly silly, and deeply grounded in the chaos of growing up.
If you are looking to physically own the film instead of renting it on streaming every time you get nostalgic, Lionsgate Limited is releasing a beautiful 4K + Blu-ray + Digital release, available exclusively through their store on August 11th. The real selling point here for collectors is a brand-new featurette titled "The Risk of Rock & Roll: Going Back to Sing Street," which gives us a fresh look back at the movie now that it has had some time to sit and age properly.
Outside of the new extra, the disc packages together all the legacy features we originally got back in 2016. That means you get the standard "Making Sing Street" mini-doc, raw cast audition tapes, B-roll footage, TV spots, the theatrical trailer, and the full "Drive It Like You Stole It" music video. You also get that slightly odd conversation piece where director John Carney sits down with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine to talk about the film's music, which is funny to watch in hindsight given how radically different Carney's indie Irish roots are from Levine's brand of stadium pop. This is a set that belongs on every collector's shelf, one of my favorite releases of the year.
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