Paul Rudd & Nick Jonas Movie ‘Power Ballad’ Evokes Real Music Fights

At one point in Power Ballad, the latest music-focused film from director John Carney, a record executive tells a fading boy band star, played by Nick Jonas, not to worry about plagiarism accusations from a little-known singer, played by Paul Rudd. After all, he says, “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.”

While Carney’s movie is aimed at a wide audience, that line is going to resonate with a very specific subset of them: music lawyers. It’s a legendary axiom of the trade going back decades — the idea being that if you get popular enough in the music business, somebody is eventually going to sue you for a cut.

“Anything to get lawyers laughing at the cinema,” Carney jokes while speaking with Billboard about Power Ballad, which hits theaters nationwide this Friday (June 5).

Like all his films, Power Ballad mines human drama from the world of music. The critically-adored Once (2007) showed the power of music to heal and connect people; his Sing Street (2016) used it to anchor a coming-of-age story. This time, Carney’s found his story in a type of conflict that the music industry has come to know all too well in recent years.

Rick Power (Rudd) is a middle-aged wedding singer who sees his heartfelt song stolen by Danny Wilson (Jonas), an ex-boy bander trying to become a solo star. As it climbs the charts, Rick becomes obsessed with proving the track was his original creation, but nobody believes him — not his band, not his lawyers, maybe not even his wife. Danny flatly denies it, and there’s no evidence to prove him wrong.

That’s a story that’s played out many times in the real world, where music stars are regularly hit with copyright lawsuits and legal threats over sound-alike songs. Some are valid, filed by artists who have genuinely had their material copied by a bigger name; many others are not, claiming plagiarism in little more than similar vibes or basic chords.

“I know a lot of musicians and songwriters, and I think every one of them past a certain level success or fortune or fame gets one or two of these claims, so it was in my world for a long time,” Carney says about the inspiration for the plot. “Then it started to show up in the newspapers more and more.”

Back in 2022, Dua Lipa was accused of stealing her mega-hit “Levitating” from a little-known Florida reggae group in a case that was later dropped. Later that year, Ed Sheeran won a high-profile trial over claims that his chart-topping “Shape of You” copied a song called “Oh Why” by a smaller artist named Sami Chokri. Then in 2023, Post Malone settled with a studio musician who claimed he’d helped create the smash “Circles” during an all-night jam session and then been denied credit. There have been countless more examples both before and since.

While Power Ballad features a few lawyers and some spirited threats over the phone, it mostly avoids an outright legal battle — a move Carney tells Billboard made sense for the story he was trying to tell. “We didn’t want to do a courtroom drama,” he says. “That might be very interesting [but] I’m not the guy to direct that. We decided to write a hopefully more kind of a timeless story: how an artist feels when they feel they’ve been ripped off.”

In this case that ripped-off artist is Rudd’s Rick, an American living in Ireland who once had stadium-sized ambitions as a young man but has now settled for playing weddings and living a happy life with his wife and teenage daughter. The alleged thief is Jonas’ Danny, an ex-boy band member who apparently missed his Justin Timberlake or Harry Styles moment and is now at risk of getting dropped by his label if he can’t find a solo hit quick.

After a chance encounter at a wedding, Rick and Danny spend a hazy night together drinking, smoking and jamming on each other’s songs, including Rick’s ballad “How to Write a Song (Without You).” Everyone leaves the night happy — until six months later, when Rick hears the song blaring over loudspeakers at a mall, turned into a pop song that’s revitalized Danny’s career.

As the track tops the charts and Rick fixates on proving he wrote it, his life begins to fall apart. But the singer, who once dreamed of pop stardom for himself, simply cannot bring himself to give up the fight. Those big emotions are what power Carney’s movie, and they, too, are rooted in real-life fights — where accusers often spend years of their lives and rack up huge legal bills on doomed pursuits of recognition.

“Researching the project, it made me realize that you could, and I’m sure plenty of people have, kind of die on the altar of getting remuneration and credit for their thing. But it’s not worth it,” Carney says. “You don’t want to lose too much of your present life on earth fighting for something for too long.”

In the real world, of course, many of those accusers are simply wrong. Whether they’ve cynically made their claims to win a payout or genuinely believe their song was copied, the majority of song-theft cases end in defeat. Judges often rule there’s no evidence a pop star ever even heard the allegedly-copied song, as one did in 2024 in a case against Megan Thee Stallion. In other cases, like one against Katy Perry, courts say the songs share only basic “building blocks” like chords that everyone is free to use.

What makes Power Ballad so fun is that the audience knows from the outset that Rick is actually right. Because of how such cases typically play out, the whole world is predisposed to dismiss him — to think he’s just another kook who came out of the woodwork with a wild conspiracy theory about a pop song. But like many of the people who bring those kinds of allegations, Rick is desperate to understand why Danny didn’t give him credit, and to be believed.

For Carney, himself a longtime musician who has been putting songs on screen for decades, that’s an “endlessly interesting” topic that was worth exploring. “I think I’ve been on both sides of the thing,” he says. “I’ve never been in a courtroom, but I’ve been emotionally invested with various people — in who did what and who deserves what.”