Sing Street 2016

Director: John Carney Starring: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Kelly Thornton, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Jack Reynor, Aidan Gillen, Ian Kenny, Ben Carolan, Percy Chamburuka, Mark McKenna and Don Wycherley.

Y oung Conor’s family is undergoing financial and personal difficulties. The former leads to him being pulled from his private school and sent to the Synge Street public school in Dublin. There he falls for a girl across the road and invites her to be in his music video. But he has neither songs—nor a band—so he starts recruiting. Connor’s about 15, as are most of the other boys in the film, and at that age there’s the tremendous variance in height and physical maturity.

This is also a relationship movie: Conor starts his whole project to impress Ann. He is mentored by his brother Brendan who stands as the character who wants Conor to escape their cultural prison.

But for me the relationship with a fellow band member was the most impressive.

Eamon, the most musically talented of the group, was Conor’s touchstone whenever he had a musical idea. There was something in actor Mark McKenna’s performance that brought back my fading memories of boyhood friendships at that age.

If you want to get picky about the story, the lads get very competent rather quickly, but that’s a small concession, well worth making, to roll with the story and songs.

There are a couple of villains, but they’re around eight out of ten on the threat scale, and one is eventually converted to the right side of things.

The kids are mostly unknowns who do a fine job. You’ll recognise some of the grown-ups: Aidan Gillen, Little Finger from ‘ Game of Thrones’, Maria Doyle Kennedy from ‘ Orphan Black’ and, more relevantly, 1991’s ‘The Commitments’.

The music for the band is newly written, but covers the range of the mid-1980s. I’ve kind of put the mainstream music from that decade into a personal black hole, with a few exceptions.

This movie threatened to give me a new appreciation of the decade. The songs were catchy, fairly wide-ranging in style from ballad lovesongs to Duran Duran-ish electronica-pop.

Picture wise, this is just about perfect with a high bit-rate and sharp, clean photography that captures those irritating 1980s pastels superbly.

The sound is lossless DTS-HD Master Audio surround with 24-bits of resolution. It does a fine job of delivering the music that might, just, take some of us back to earlier days.