RATING:
Sing Street is a gem. It is a delightful, lively tale brimming with a charm that sweeps you off your feet, a coming-of-age story that evokes past classics such as The Breakfast Club and Say Anything, filled with interesting characters and good music. In a year plagued with turgid insipidity toxicity, Sing Street is an antidote to the endless plethora of alien invasions, superheroes and uninspired creativity.
(Caution: if your music preference towards the mainstream, you might not be as enamoured by the 80’s-heavy soundtrack. You have been warned.)
1985, Dublin. Conor Lawlor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is transferred to Synge Street, a state school, because his parents can no longer afford his school fees. His father, Robert (Aidan Gillen), thinks the new environment run by the Christian brothers will be good for his youngest child. Conor’s elder brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), a hash-loving college dropout with an informed taste in music, begs to differ. “The Christian Brothers,” he tells Conor seriously, “are an order of the Catholic Church, self-appointed in the education, formation, and systematic beating of their young charges”. Synge Street’s school motto in Latin translates to ‘Act Manly’. It’s a well-known secret that these words are also carved above the entrance to Hell, just below ‘Abandon all hope’.
Sure enough, Synge Street is Hell to Conor. More polished and refined than the other students, he stands out immediately and gets marked on his first day by Brother Baxter (Don Wycherly) for wearing brown shoes instead of black, and then by a bully named Barry (Ian Kenny). Great start.
The human spirit is strange. Adversity often brings out a resilience in certain individuals to cope with the conditions. Just read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning to understand. Even though Synge Street is nowhere near the Holocaust, it’s still an unfriendly environment to Conor. At the same time, it leads to the very opportunity that helps him.
On his second day, Conor makes a friend. Darren (Ben Carolan) is a short ginger-haired kid and aspiring entrepreneur with his own hand-made business card made of cardboard offering ‘business solutions’. “There’s no number on it,” Conor points out. “We don’t have a phone,” replies Darren, unfazed. “But call around”. That is entrepreneurial spirit.
Almost immediately after, they notice a girl standing opposite the school. Conor heads over to talk. Decked in the armour of fashion and makeup, this girl is a siren, and her name is Raphina (Lucy Boynton). She doesn’t go to school. “I’m a model,” she tells him coolly. With that attitude and looks, it’s not hard to believe. Conor is enamoured but not intimidated. She notices that. And she seems to like that.
Then Conor asks her to appear in a music video for his band. “You have a band?” she asks. “Yeah”. She makes him sing the hook from A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’. He does. She relents and gives her number. He hurries back to Darren. “We need to form a band,” Conor tells him. He wasn’t lying, he was just chronologically impaired, to quip Neil Gaiman.
Parts of Sing Street were inspired by real-life events in writer-director John Carney’s life. I think anybody, irrespective of nationality and race, can relate to wanting to be in a band or learn a musical instrument solely to woo a girl that they liked. It’s a tale as old as… whenever it became popular to be a rock star.
Their first recruit is Eamon (Mark McKenna), a skinny kid with large glasses who can play nearly any instrument. Later, he writes songs with Conor. Whether by choice or coincidence, Conor and Eamon uncannily respectively resemble Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Depending on the occasion, Conor also looks like Billie Joe Armstrong while Eamon also looks like a young John Cusack.
With a bass player, a keyboardist and a drummer, they form the band, ‘Sing Street’. Brendan advises that they create original music. And what do you know, the songs are really good (much of the music was written by musician Gary Clark; in the credits, Bono and The Edge from U2 were involved with the developing of the film). It certainly impresses Raphina enough to show up.
Like its lead character, Sing Street starts off timidly before suddenly blooming with an unexpected confidence and maturity. The film never gets cynical even when Conor’s parents split up or when Raphina disappears to London with her older boyfriend. The cast is stellar, the script is earnest and heartfelt script, and the music is grand.
But mostly, Sing Street is refreshingly un-Hollywood. The closest it gets to a happy ending is in Conor’s head when he pictures the music video during rehearsals for their stand-out number, “Drive It Like You Stole It”, a Back to the Future 50’s-throwback that conjures post-war America. In his mind’s eye, the auditorium is packed auditorium. Brother Baxter does cartwheels. His parents show up and are very much in love. Brendan arrives on a motorbike, looking like Irish Jim Stark. The band are dressed in red suits and Conor looks like Plato from Rebel Without A Cause. Everything is good. More than that, Raphina walks through the auditorium door, hauntingly resplendent in a blue dress.
Therein lies the tragedy: it exists only in Conor’s imagination. Brendan and his family never do show up (though the former does encourage his brother’s aspirations) and on that rehearsal day, Raphina never does walk through that door.
For his third feature film, John Carney has assembled a cast of mostly unknowns surrounded by more established actors like Jack Reynor, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Aidan Gillen to play the Lawlors, and Don Wycherly as the antagonistic but never villainous Brother Baxter. The children have an easy-going rapport that never feels stagey at any time.
If anyone does steal the light, it would be Lucy Boynton. She has a mesmerising screen presence that very few performers possess, one such actress being Marilyn Monroe. Boynton has a knack for conveying sheer volumes of information whether through the subtlest of gestures, the intensity in her eyes, her posture, or by what she leaves unsaid, suggesting the fragile, vulnerable and lonely girl with a maturity far beyond her years lurking beneath that chic appearance. It’s a fantastic feat and it wouldn’t surprise me if she ends up at the Academy Awards in the near future.
To add to the list of distinguished accomplishments, Sing Street is the rare film that demands a sequel even though it doesn’t need one, the way Before Sunset followed up Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. At the film’s close, Conor and Raphina take the boat that belonged to the former’s grandfather and sail across the Irish Sea to London. It’s a bold romantic bold gesture, especially considering they get caught to rain, rough seas and nearly getting run down by the ferry. It is young love at its finest: after all, what’s grander than two young kids running away in search of their dreams? Question is: what happens? Will Conor and Raphina succeed? Will they rise up in their respective careers? Will Sing Street get a record contract? And will Conor and Raphina stay together as they grow up? If Richard Linklater took a decade between each instalment to make the Before trilogy and if Trainspotting took over twenty years to make a sequel, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the next chapter in the saga of Conor and Raphina.
Sing Street reminds us that not all films have to revolve around saving the world. Sometimes, it’s just about a boy trying to impress a girl, and that’s perfectly fine.
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WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: John Carney
PRODUCED BY: Anthony Bregman, John Carney, Kevin Scott Frakes, Christian Grass, Martina Niland, Raj Brinder Singh, Paul Trijbits
STARRING: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Aidan Gillen, Jack Reynor, Mark McKenna, Don Wycherly, Ben Carolan, Ian Kenny
The Snarky Quill 