MOVIES
BY RICK LEVIN
PLAY ANYTHING
Irish kids in the mid-’80s start a garage band
in John Carney’s sweetly nostalgic Sing Street
I
n order to understand my response to Sing Street,
director John Carney’s love letter to Irish teens
starting a garage band in mid-’80s Dublin, I’m going
to have to tell you a bit about myself.
I came of age in a small Northwest town at the ass
end of the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear annihilation
was about to be replaced by the plague of AIDS as the
greatest goad to adolescent nihilism. Things weren’t good
at home, and as it went at home, so it seemed to go with
the world.
As a smart, restless high school student with increasingly
manic-depressive tendencies, I was slouching toward
despair until two things literally saved my life: working on
the school newspaper and joining a punk rock band.
The student newspaper taught me the real value of
work and of attaching my energies and talents to something
bigger than myself, but it was singing in a punk band that
completely cracked open the hardening husk of my
discontent. Suddenly, my yearning and frustration had an
outlet, and I began to find a creative voice. What’s more,
my bandmates became my brothers, a gang of ragtag
suburban brats whose unifying theme was the unbounded
ambition and thrill of making really loud music.
In Sing Street, Carney (Once) taps that thrill in a very
intimate way, revealing those small moments of triumph
that arrive when a band of misfits picks up instruments and
starts making noise. We meet Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo),
a shy kid whose home life is going to shit as a wallowing
economy forces his parents to place him in a cheaper
Catholic school. Conor’s slacker older brother, Brendan
(the excellent Jack Reynor), tutors him on the deeper
implications of great music, after which Conor gets the
idea of starting up his own band, partly to get the attention
of a waifish dropout, Raphina (Lucy Boynton).
The film follows a trajectory that is utterly rote and
predictable, and it wraps the story in a rosy glow of
nostalgia and heroic overcoming that recalls, at times, the
pubescent schmaltz of John Hughes’ worst moments. And
yet, despite its overly sentimental tendencies (no garage
band gets that good that fast), Sing Street gets so much
right: the ragged, fumbling beginnings of musicians
learning to be musicians; the hard work and heady joy of
songwriting; the evolution of identity, as imitation becomes
authenticity; and, most importantly, the uplifting effects of
art, as lost kids come to find a meaning and purpose that is
sorely lacking in the rest of their lives, including school.
In a very real, very emotional way, Sing Street brought
home to me the profound impact being in a band had on
me — and, I would venture, any floundering kid — in
permanently altering my course in life. Watching the
movie, tears welled up in my eyes, not of sadness but of a
cosmic and slightly sorrowful gratitude for the way a
direct, furious involvement in music granted me a reason
for being.
Sorrowful because, as a society, we seem to be losing
in a very disastrous way our understanding that fostering
creativity in young people — in all people — ties us to our
better angels and our finest instincts as a species. My band
was kicking against all the usual pricks, but at least we still
had art programs in our schools.
Then again, wherever there’s the possibility of a pissed
kid in a basement with an amp and a shitty guitar, there’s
still hope. They can’t take that away. (Broadway Metro)
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eugeneweekly.com • May 19, 2016
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