If you were to divide the total number of bands there have ever been by the total number of hits there have ever been, it would be clear that most bands have never had a single hit. That means if you’re a one-hit wonder, you’ve really been highly, highly successful. A single hit is a near miracle.

In Power Ballad, Rick Power (Paul Rudd) is a loving husband and father who sings in a good wedding band people really like. He once had a pop band and a record deal — he even toured, which is how he came to Ireland, met a woman, married her, had a daughter with her, and made his life there. He continues to make a living as a performing musician who makes people happy, which, again, qualifies him as more successful than he perhaps gives himself credit for.

At a wedding, he meets Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), who used to be in a boy band and is trying to get a solo career off the ground. He and Rick see something kindred in each other, and they end up spending the night drinking and playing music and talking about songs they’re working on. Rick plays him an unfinished ballad called “How To Write A Song Without You.”

A few months later, Rick is at the mall when he hears “How To Write A Song Without You” playing. As it turns out, Danny finished the song by adding a bridge, brought it to his people as his own, and has released it as a single. When Rick reaches out for credit, Danny denies everything (through his management). Rick has no proof that he wrote it. He sets out, with increasing intensity, to confront Danny.

Nick Jonas as Danny Wilson and Paul Rudd as Rick Power in Power Ballad.

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This story is, in part, about credit and money. That could seem like an incongruous direction for director and co-writer John Carney, who previously made beloved, big-hearted films like Once and Sing Street that are also about musicians, but where credit and money are beside the point.

The film isn’t really about credit and money, though. It’s about the fact that Rick has been working in music for decades and has never produced, for himself or the people he loves, much hard evidence that he’s good. Maybe that kind of hard evidence isn’t even a thing. Artistic success is hard to define, but Rick has never even gotten far enough to split those hairs. But now, suddenly, there is this (maddeningly unreliable) indicator of quality: He wrote a monster hit. He wrote a song people love. It’s easy to talk about wanting credit as if there’s something small or grimy about it, especially when money is involved. But if Rick wanting credit is grimy, then surely Danny denying him credit is doubly so.

Danny, for his part, is less a villain than a coward. His public image is souring, and he’s got a slimy manager (played by Jack Reynor, who deserves bad things here just as much as he did in Midsommar and The Perfect Couple) threatening to drop him. So when his girlfriend (Havana Rose Liu) overhears him noodling around with Rick’s song, misunderstands it to be his, and loves it, he can’t resist. The script cleverly includes the complicating detail that Danny did finish the song by writing the bridge, so it’s not as if he didn’t contribute anything. It’s a song they both worked on; it’s just that by the time Rick is trying to get things straightened out, it’s much too late for Danny to admit that he lifted the song from a middle-aged wedding singer and lied about it.

By the end, Power Ballad has said some pretty profound things about art, including a warning that shortcuts are unsatisfying. Danny achieves huge commercial success with “How To Write A Song Without You,” but he has guaranteed that performing the song will always feel empty. Why? Because he’s pretending. He didn’t write the song, and he doesn’t even understand the song.

Danny wants to be a star, and he knows how to get what stars have. He has what it takes. But he also wants to perform a song and know that it came from him, that it is of his heart and mind, and that it is good. He is a talented performer who got greedy, and he decided he had to have what songwriters have. Ending a songwriting experience with money and recognition isn’t a requirement. But beginning it with your own brain is. Otherwise, you simply cannot have what songwriters have, no matter how many stadiums you play.

And while this isn’t a movie about AI, it’s safe to assume that if trying to take credit for a song somebody else wrote won’t truly satisfy, taking credit for a song no human being wrote won’t either. In fact, if Danny’s experience says anything, it’s that a good song may not have come from you, but at least it came from somebody. Somebody cared about the making of it, even if it was somebody else. After all, plenty of very good performers don’t write their own songs, which is fine — unless you fib about it.

It’s a terrific movie; the leads are both very good and perfectly cast. The song that is supposed to be a huge pop hit is a very plausible pop hit, which isn’t always how it goes. The ending is satisfying but bittersweet, like pretty much every ending Carney has ever made. Ultimately, Power Ballad posits that in art, as in life, it should matter if you’re honest. It should matter if you did what you say you did. And perhaps too optimistically, it suggests that a genuine one-hit wonder is likely happier than a superstar who’s lying.

This piece also appears in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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It was 2 p.m. on a Saturday in early January when I drove to Silver Lake to pick up a table from Facebook Marketplace.

It was one of those dramatic Los Angeles afternoons when the sky had darkened early and rain felt inevitable. I had been searching for a Midcentury Modern table for my new apartment, 33 floors above downtown L.A. After a year in Long Beach, I was moving again, trying for a clean beginning after the traumatic end of a nine-year relationship.

Facebook Marketplace pickups aren’t supposed to be intimate. You arrive, look the thing over, act a little indifferent, maybe negotiate, then hand over cash or Venmo the seller and leave. I had already decided to offer $700, a hundred less than the seller was asking.

But when I walked toward the house, the first thing I noticed was the woman waiting outside. She was Korean, in her 30s and pretty in a way that didn’t announce itself. And then she said my name correctly.

“Huy?”

Not “Wee.” Not “Huey.” Not the small pause people make before deciding they don’t want to try.

“Huy.”

It was such a small thing, but I noticed. I had spent my whole life hearing people get my name wrong.

She led me inside, and I glanced at the table. Clean lines. Warm wood. Exactly what I had been looking for. Within minutes, we were no longer talking about furniture. Somehow we were talking about life transitions and grief.

I told her that I was moving to downtown L.A. after a brief stay in Long Beach and years living in West L.A. I needed a reprieve from something I had gone through.

She told me she was selling as much as she could because she was thinking of leaving L.A. and moving back to Orange County. She was in the middle of a breakup, and her ex was moving out that weekend.

There we were: two strangers in Silver Lake, surrounded by furniture being sold off piece by piece, both trying to make new lives from the remains of our old ones.

And then, because apparently I no longer know what is normal to say during a Facebook Marketplace transaction, I told her, “Yeah, I just got out of a nine-year relationship. It ended in total chaos — legally, emotionally, all of it.”

She looked at me the way anyone should look at a man who had come to buy a table and somehow ended up revealing a past he was still trying to heal from.

Concerned. Curious. Alert.

“I know that sounds intense,” I said, half-laughing. “There’s context. I promise. I’ve been telling the story in the L.A. storytelling circuit, and it recently became a podcast episode.”

This was either a red flag or a very Los Angeles credential, depending on the neighborhood.

She asked for the episode. I sent it to her.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “You’re like a mini-celebrity.”

“Yeah,” I said sheepishly. “I guess you could say that.”

By the time I loaded half the table into my car, I had forgotten all about my plan to negotiate. I paid the full $800. The other half wouldn’t fit, so I asked if I could come back the following week. Before I left, I told her to listen to the podcast and let me know what she thought.

The next day, she texted. She had listened and said she could empathize with so much of what I had shared.

A week later, I returned for the other half of the table. By then, I was no longer just the guy from Facebook Marketplace.

“Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe you endured something like that.”

Then she said, “If you’re ever around and want to grab a drink, that’d be cool.”

I didn’t hear it as a romantic invitation exactly. I had been through too much to know what to do with ambiguity.

But it moved me. Not because I thought, “Oh, this woman wants me.” More because I had handed a stranger one of the most vulnerable parts of my life, and she didn’t step away. She opened a door.

A few days later, I got a text from an acquaintance I hadn’t spoken to in years.

“Hey,” he wrote. “Were you recently on Facebook Marketplace? Did you buy a table from Michelle?”

He and Michelle were close friends. She had told him about meeting an anesthesia provider who did sound baths in the operating room and had been on a podcast. Stranger still, he knew the friends who had taken me in after everything fell apart — people who had become part of the story I told in the podcast.

Because this is Los Angeles, where everyone is anonymous until suddenly everyone is connected.

Eventually, I took Michelle up on her invitation.

We met at Thank You Coffee in Chinatown and sat outside. She brought her dog, a small, rambunctious golden doodle who kept moving around under the table. I ordered a third-wave coffee from China, which I didn’t even know existed. Then we walked to a pastry shop and picked up a few things to share.

She had a slight lisp, and I remember thinking how specific her voice felt. How real she was, sitting there in the middle of her own life coming apart.

At some point, I asked what made her want to have coffee with me.

She told me her ex was a public defender, and he had shared stories about the lives people carry beneath the facts of their cases. She said it taught her that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

With the podcast episode out, I worried people would hear the worst part first and decide they already knew me. But Michelle didn’t do that.

Sitting there outside Thank You Coffee, I felt something in me soften. I could sit with someone new and tell the truth. I could listen to her tell the truth back. And for the first time in a while, I could feel my heart open without needing to turn the moment into a future.

By the time the table was in my apartment, 33 floors above downtown Los Angeles, I wondered if that was what I had been doing all along — seeing if I still believed in beginnings.

Maybe that was too much to ask of a table. Or a woman I met in Silver Lake. Or one coffee in Chinatown. But something had shifted. Michelle was not the answer. I’m not even sure there was a question. She was just a woman who said my name correctly, listened to a story I was afraid would make me untouchable and stayed curious.

And maybe, for now, I could too.

The author is a certified registered nurse anesthetist at UCLA Medical Center. He lives in downtown L.A. He’s on Instagram: @polycrna.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Cape Fear, based on a 1957 novel by John D. MacDonald, already has inspired two intense films about a man who, recently released from prison, goes on to terrorize his former attorney. Now there’s a new 10-part miniseries from Apple TV, which premieres its first two episodes June 5.

The first Cape Fear movie was in 1962, starring Robert Mitchum as ex-convict Max Cady, and Gregory Peck as attorney Sam Bowden. Peck’s Bowden was heroic and strong, but Mitchum’s ex-con was a playful, vengeful force of nature. One of the most powerful scenes in that movie was when Cady cornered Bowden’s wife, played by Polly Bergen, in a kitchen, grabbed and crushed a raw egg, then smeared it across her exposed shoulders as she shuddered with fear.

Mitchum’s very verbal sociopath has provided the template for dozens of movie and TV predators since. Those would include, most prominently, the eccentric killers played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, and Billy Bob Thornton in the first season of TV’s Fargo. And Robert De Niro, of course, who played Max Cady in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, opposite Nick Nolte as the defense attorney.

The most gripping and uncomfortable scene in that version, which was directed by Martin Scorsese, may have been the moment in which DeNiro’s Cady is alone with Bowden’s teenage daughter, played by Juliette Lewis, and approaches her with a mix of charisma and menace. Scorsese kept Cady as evil as before, but made Bowden a much less noble protagonist. And that’s why, I suspect, Scorsese has returned as an executive producer, along with Steven Spielberg, to present Apple TV’s new, expanded version of Cape Fear. This time, the shades of gray are everywhere you look.

Nick Antosca, who created and oversaw this new miniseries, has made some bold choices from the start — beginning with the casting and the primary characters. In the two movies, Bowden’s wife and family were targeted by Cady purely to get revenge on Bowden. In this new story, Bowden’s wife, Anna, was Cady’s defense attorney, and Bowden was the prosecutor. It puts her in the narrative more centrally, and pays off.

Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson are really, really good as the Bowdens, and play their parts with shifting layers of innocence and guilt. And playing Cady? It’s none other than Bardem, who already has embodied one world-class villain — and here he comes again.

Apple TV provided eight of the 10 episodes for preview, so I don’t know how this Cape Fear ends. But I know how cleverly it updates and expands the story. It’s set in today’s world, so there are cell phones, podcasters, rideshares, catfishing and public shaming — all of which figure into the plot.

There are also flashbacks, not only to Cady’s prison years, but to Bowden’s childhood, which is similarly fleshed out. And best of all, major new supporting characters are presented — some of whom inherit the stalking behaviors exhibited by Cady in the film versions. And those films are echoed with respect. Just as Scorsese found room for Peck and Mitchum to appear as other characters in his 1991 remake, this new Cape Fear pulls the same trick by casting someone from Scorsese’s film.

Bardem is riveting here, but he’s by no means the only reason to watch. The story may be familiar, but this new Cape Fear rolls out one surprise after another. Some scenes are scary, some are violent and some are creepy. And part of the suspense, in this new adaptation, is figuring out who the creeps really are — and where the evil really lies.