Sing Street

If Brat­pack deity John Hugh­es were alive today, you could well imag­ine him mak­ing a film like Sing Street, a jol­ly if inef­fec­tu­al grow­ing pains com­e­dy that’s lib­er­al­ly fes­tooned with elec­tro-pop chart top­pers and sil­ly jokes. Such as it is, we’ll have to make do with this ver­sion by John Car­ney, the direc­tor who went nuclear after his hushed busk­ing dra­ma, Once, cap­tured the heart of a nation back in 2007.

Set in Dublin dur­ing the 1980s, at a time when any­one with even a scin­til­la of ambi­tion or cre­ativ­i­ty had their sights set on mov­ing to Lon­don, the film fol­lows gawky school­boy Cos­mo (Fer­dia Walsh-Pee­lo) as he decides to start a band. The sole pur­pose of his endeav­our is to steal a kiss from the gor­geous wannabe-mod­el, Raphi­na (Lucy Boyn­ton), who loi­ters seduc­tive­ly on the steps of the house oppo­site his school gates.

And that’s pret­ty much it. Car­ney ladles on the fond peri­od details, back-tracked with a selec­tion of toe-tap­ping dit­ties, and mere­ly allows the sto­ry to go exact­ly where you expect it to go after about the first 10 min­utes. It’s a shame that Car­ney always shoots for the iron­ic or nos­tal­gic laugh, sel­dom using the time and set­ting to actu­al­ly say things about the char­ac­ters. A scene in which Cos­mo and his layabout muso broth­er Bren­dan (Jack Reynor) rhap­sodise about the pro­mo for Duran Duran’s ​‘Rio’ as it plays on TV is mere­ly a chance to snick­er at the white bread fan­cy boys in their pen­ny loafers and shark-skin suits.

The film’s best moment is a bril­liant throw-away gag which undu­ly makes a very minor char­ac­ter one of the most round­ed and inter­est­ing. Cosmo’s band have to rehearse in the front room of his mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist pal Eamon (Mark McKen­na), whose father is sel­dom home. As the band belt out anoth­er of their sick­en­ing­ly melod­ic par­ty bangers, we cut away to Eamon’s moth­er sat on her bed, beam­ing at her son’s inge­nu­ity while revving up a vibra­tor. The tragedy of her sex­u­al lone­li­ness and the odd rela­tion­ship she has with both son and hus­band is only allowed to reg­is­ter for a split sec­ond, but it’s enough to imbue this char­ac­ter with a vibrant per­son­al and emo­tion­al history.

Else­where, Car­ney strug­gles to beef up the side play­ers: Cosmo’s bick­er­ing par­ents, played by two greats – Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy – are flick­er­ing shad­ows rather than fleshed-out beings. An increas­ing­ly fraught domes­tic sit­u­a­tion appears to have no bear­ing on any­one, as Bren­dan con­tin­ues to mope and Cosmo’s band goes from strength to strength as fam­i­ly ties slow­ly dis­in­te­grate. The gen­er­al air of lev­i­ty is occa­sion­al­ly punc­tured with the odd, awk­ward devi­a­tion into child molest­ing priests and the social prison of poverty. 

But a rebel­lious, can-do spir­it appears to be all that’s need­ed to save the day. The fun, musi­cal­ly-dri­ven first half gives way to less inter­est­ing teen canoodling, all before we arrive at rather a sap­py, air-punch­ing cli­max. It’s all good, clean fun, but maybe a lit­tle too good and too clean. Plus, it’s hard to get over the fact that quite a lot of the music sounds like icky X‑Factor cast-offs.