'Once' director John Carney talks '80s pop and Catholic school demerits

Can a song save your life? When John Carney's movie Begin Again - with Keira Knightley as a heartbroken balladeer and Mark Ruffalo as a career-in-crisis record exec - debuted at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, that was the original title.

Can a Song Safe Your Life is a title that would have worked on Carney's breakthrough effort, too, the little Irish movie that could, 2007's busker romance Once.

Carney just as easily could have applied the title to his latest: the buoyant, autobiographically tinged 1980s coming-of-age tale Sing Street.

All three are affirmations of the power of music.

"There is definitely a message that runs through each of them, that's woven in there," says the writer and director. "I look at them like a triptych of movies - like three paintings on the north wall."

In Sing Street, opening Friday at the Ritz East and Carmike Ritz Center/NJ, Carney follows a 14-year-old Dubliner (the magnificently named Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) as his home life starts to crumble, as he's forced to switch schools, and as he forms a rock band - not because he's driven to pursue a life making music, but because he's trying to impress a girl.

The band is called Sing Street. The school Walsh-Peelo's Conor is unhappily transferred to is called Synge Street. It's the same Roman Catholic Dublin school that Carney attended when he was a teen.

There's a scene in Sing Street with the rebellious Conor sternly admonished by the school's head for wearing brown shoes. Only black will do.

That detail is straight from Carney's life.

"I was beaten up by a teacher for not wearing black shoes," he says on the phone from New York, stuck in a car in midtown traffic the other day. "Amazing, actually - I can't believe that I was, and I had nobody to take it up with. There was nobody to complain to. You just sort of dealt with it. . . . I probably handed that down, like some terrible energy force, to someone else when I was in my 20s or my 30s."

But at least he got to use the detail in a movie. He also got to use his experiences as a kid who starts a band. The fledgling quintet in Carney's film attentively follows the music videos of the day (Duran Duran, the Cure) and closely studies the hits (Hall & Oates, Joe Jackson), before repairing to the garage to craft their own numbers. The influences - the '80s pop sound, the '80s music video aesthetic - are comically apparent.

And when Conor boasts to the beautiful Raphina (Lucy Boynton) that he's shooting a video for a new song, he rushes home to write the tune with his buddy, Eamon (Mark McKenna), so she can be in the video that he's already invited her to star in. Here's a verse from the highly Duran Duran-esque "The Riddle of the Model" that the lads come up with:

She's so indecipherable

She holds the keys to the missing code

Just the thought of her touch -

My mind explodes

"It's an accidental band in a way," says Carney. "It comes together from a lie and a bluff. It's not based on some vocational calling that this kid has - it's based on deciding to be something, and then seeing whether you can live up to it.

"Which is kind of the way I was when I was young," he adds, laughing. "It's not like I passed a film exam, or Scorsese gave me a mortarboard one day. It just sort of happened."

The songs in Sing Street are just right, wearing their '80s influences on their (puffy) sleeves, amateurish, derivative, but also catchy and cool. Maybe this Conor kid and his bandmates have what it takes.

To come up with that sound track, Carney turned to Gary Clark, whose Scottish '80s band, Danny Wilson, is probably best known for the catchy, quintessential time-capsule hit "Mary's Prayer."

"I just rang Gary out of the blue," Carney remembers. "I always loved the album off which that song is from. So I just got his number, I called him up and introduced myself, and then we took it from there. We got on very well. He's kind of a Celt, like myself. And you know, the distance from Dundee to Dublin isn't that far. He jumped on a plane and we started.

"Gary came up in that era, he has 10 years or so on me, and his band, Danny Wilson, I loved them as a kid. So we took it from there and talked about his experiences of being in a proper band and the record label and all that stuff, and other bands he had seen come and go. He knew an awful lot about that era and gave the film, I think, a sonic authenticity."

In one of those mysterious cosmic Hollywood convergences, Sing Street is not alone in paying homage to the days of big hair and acid-washed jeans. Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days follows a French kid navigating the same pop cult waters, Paris-style, and Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! chronicles the debauched rush weekend of an '80s college freshman, the music, the cars, the coeds.

"Yeah, I hate to be in competition with Linklater," Carney offers. "That's not good. I'd come out the loser in that battle, I'm afraid."

The self-deprecating Irish filmmaker says that, at least for him, looking back with affection to a time that used to make him wince is just a sign he's arrived at middle age.

"Certainly, it's weird when you start to realize that things in your life are nostalgic," he observes. "But when you hit your 40s, that begins to happen. Your generation starts looking at that decade when they were that age with less horror and more romance and affection."

srea@phillynews.com
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