Sing Street takes place roughly half a decade after the last film this writer reviewed, Everybody Wants Some. In both stories, the setting is somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, during the homestretch of the Cold War. In both stories, a group of adolescents come together in the name of fellowship, bonding over the pop culture of the time and a desire to break away from the tangible. And in both stories, at some point, Pop Muzik by M shows up in the background.
The more recent of the two films comes courtesy of Irish filmmaker John Carney, most well-known for grabbing the attention of the film world in 2007 with Once. His previous film, 2014’s Begin Again, was his first film made across the Atlantic pond. Now Sing Street sees him return to the streets of Dublin, where our protagonist Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, somewhat of a ringer for Freddie Highmore) enrolls at the local Christian Brothers school (at the whim of his father, played Aidan Gillen a.k.a. Littlefinger) where his passion for music is awakened by his older brother (Jack Reynor) and a desire to start a band to win the heart of the mysterious Ralphine (Lucy Boynton).
There is an element of autobiography here, not unlike how it was for Greg Mottola in Adventureland or Steven Chbosky in Perks of Being a Wallflower. John Carney’s own musical background does have a notable stint as bassist for the 90’s Irish band The Frames, a band led by his Once star Glen Hansard. Details such as his school’s insistence on black shoes are pages taken from his own life story, much like how Almost Famous reflected the advent of Cameron Crowe’s career in music journalism through the shy, blossoming music aficionado.
To that end, the story and character beats are conventional but organized delicately. This film is a little more innocent than those just mentioned, or even something like the amiable nostalgia of Everybody Wants Some. The catholic schoolboys of Sing Street are right at the onset of puberty, not yet so acquainted with the confusing realities of drugs, sex, mental illness, etcetera. Not to say that they aren’t troublemakers, but there’s a bright-eyed charm to everything they do.
Like in Begin Again, the musical landscape that the characters inherit has quite a verisimilitude. Carney loves to relate the characters’ musical lives to the way they live with everything else. The fertile era of 80’s post-punk and new wave is almost the ideal context in which to do this, with the multiple subcultures inspired by those sounds – punks, goths, mods, futurists, among others. The result is an ode to how music shapes identity; especially how it gives glory to being a misfit, an underdog, or a despairing romantic that otherwise might not exist. People tend to look at someone’s musical taste as part of a bigger picture; Cosmo’s brother warns him that a woman can never truly loves a man that listens to Phil Collins, for instance. Sing Street is a film about discovering the music you want the world to judge you by.
Sing Street is rated PG-13 for thematic elements including strong language and some bullying behavior, a suggestive image, drug material and teen smoking. Now Playing.
