Entertainment
'MaXXXine' is Ti West's Hollywood horror story. The real-life locations are even scarier
Horror filmmaker Ti West steps out of the blackness behind the Bates Motel hours after the last tourist tram has made it to safety. Behind him looms the “Psycho” house where Mrs. Bates lurked in the window monitoring the movements of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane — a shot West references in his 2022 slasher “X,” set in 1979, about an elderly farm wife named Pearl who becomes murderously inflamed by a troupe of adult actors shooting a skin flick in her barn. Pearl, an aspiring performer herself, got her own movie the following year in West’s eponymous prequel that rewinds to 1918, when the psychotic failed starlet fed her rival to an alligator named Theda Bara.
Now, West is releasing the third chiller in the series, “MaXXXine,” which finds Maxine Minx, the sole survivor of the first film’s “Texas porn star massacre,” hellbent on becoming a legitimate movie star in 1980s Los Angeles. After six years of sex work, Maxine, played ferociously by Mia Goth, has finally landed her first mainstream role in a sequel called “The Puritan 2.” But her past is still in pursuit, with one chase scene sending Maxine fleeing for her life across the Universal Studios backlot, through the Old West facades to the New York stoops, eventually scampering up the jagged “Psycho” stairs right behind him.
“It’s a weird thing to point a camera at if you’re not making ‘Psycho,’” says West, 43, as he heads farther into the darkness, lighted only by a handful of eerie red lanterns. He calls his trilogy “movie-flavored movies” — artifice and dreams are the top notes. “X” is about scrappy strivers trying to break into the business; “Pearl,” about the dangers of buying into the fantasies onscreen. “MaXXXine,” the highest-profile film of West’s career, wrestles with accepting that Hollywood isn’t quite what one hopes.
Mia Goth in the movie “MaXXXine,” her third with West. “It was the first time I had that dynamic between me and a director where it felt there was something really intimate to it,” she says.
(A24)
“He was ready to deal with this kind of scale, and it’s definitely something he was hungry for,” Goth says, chiming in over Zoom. In addition to playing multiple roles across this mini-franchise, Goth co-wrote “Pearl” and executive-produced the last two films. “We just kind of manifested it,” she continues, “built this entire trilogy into existence. And it’s been incredible to see it unfold.”
West, however, tends to be scrupulously anti-hype. “It is not lost on me that there is a meta thing happening with these movies and me and Mia, and that’s gratifying and strange,” he says. “And it’s also something that we’ve never taken any time to stop and talk about. We were too busy making movies.”
While the marketing team at A24 is all in on “MaXXXine” — “I’ve never had a billboard before,” the director beams — West has been a legitimate filmmaker for well over a decade. His resume of well-regarded independent movies includes the 2016 cowboy vengeance drama “In a Valley of Violence” with Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, plus a string of festival hits like 2009’s “The House of the Devil,” which disposed of a pre-celeb Greta Gerwig early on in a marvelously nasty Hitchcock-esque shock.
“It hasn’t lost its mystique,” West says of the “Psycho” house, a “MaXXXine” location. “Even tonight it’s still like: What a rare opportunity to actually walk up the steps.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Still, he’s come a long way since his first trip to the Bates Motel. When he was in middle school, he and his family vacationed at Universal Studios Florida, which had just wrapped “Psycho IV” on its own copy of the set. As a promotional tie-in, the park launched an attraction that taught fans the camera tricks behind the famous shower scene. One volunteer got to brandish a rubber knife and learn how to stab a Marion Crane scream-a-like. West wasn’t chosen, but he went back home with a pair of Bates Motel souvenir slippers and an appreciation for film craft.
“Now that’s all gone, and it’s a Shrek ride or something,” he shrugs. “No offense to Shrek.”
West spent the rest of his youth in Wilmington, Del., renting five VHS tapes for $5 on Fridays at his local video store. One weekend, he rented “Habit,” a grungy but brilliant microbudget vampire flick made by filmmaker Larry Fessenden. Shortly after, he moved to New York and took a film class taught by director Kelly Reichardt, who’d played a cameo in the film. Reichardt introduced the two and Fessenden became West’s mentor, eventually producing his debut feature, “The Roost,” shot exactly 20 years ago with more moxie than money.
“Apparently, now we’re mentioned on the tour,” West adds of his upgraded circumstances, in mild disbelief. “I feel a little bit like I’ve made it.” Filming on the lot took Herculean coordination. Some theme-park trams were rerouted, others couldn’t be. Shots were hastily filmed in the gaps between gawkers. Once, the timing went awry and a few dozen tourists interrupted a take. Cameras out, the visitors snapped away at Goth and Elizabeth Debicki like they were tigers in a zoo.
West and his dog, Molly, visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery, one of the filming locations for “MaXXXine.”
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
If West is now a Hollywood animal himself, the only affectation he’s adopted is a tiny 12-pound black dog named Molly who accompanies him everywhere. During this night stroll, she’s quietly tucked into a sling around his hips. On set, Molly had her own chair that read “Executive Paw-ducer.” The next morning, as our personal tour of “MaXXXine’s” locations continues, she’s wearing an A24-branded leash and trying to sneak sips of West’s iced oat-milk latte.
Today, he and Molly and a photographer are piled into an SUV that stops at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the location where two of the film’s detectives, played by Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale, make a grisly discovery. (Molly insists on relieving herself in a spot without any graves — she’s a professional.) The fictional corpses planted here by the production were mutilated in the manner of Richard Ramirez, popularly known as the Night Stalker, the real-life L.A. serial killer who murdered at least 13 people during the ’80s. That paranoia is the film’s terrifying backdrop, just as the Spanish flu pandemic leaves scars on “Pearl.”
But this isn’t a Night Stalker story — there’s already half a dozen of those. “MaXXXine,” like West’s “The House of the Devil” before it, vibrates with the tension of Reagan-era Satanic panic, a moment of media-hyped conspiracy that manages to feel both old-fashioned and contemporary.
“When I was growing up, you could get arrested for skateboarding, and now it’s going to be in the Olympics,” West says. But grandstanding moralists stay the same, even if A24 had to hire faux protesters to wave placards that read, “Honor God, End Smut.”
“I’m hopeful that this October there are people that are going to dress up as her from all three movies,” West says of Goth’s many incarnations, including “MaXXXine,” pictured. “That’ll be really strange.”
(A24)
West puts a lot of emphasis on making the past look real, not cartoonish. No ridiculous zebra prints, no suburban mall pastels. Authenticity is baked into everything, from the camera techniques and practical effects to Maxine’s fried split ends.
The “MaXXXine” review embargo has just broken as our car arrives at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, but West barely glances at his phone. “It’ll be the appropriate mixture of ‘best movie of the three,’ ‘worst movie ever,’” he says calmly. So far, the critics like it, but West seems more fulfilled by the act of making, promoting and releasing three films in four years with barely a day off. During that same time span, he also met his fiancée, DJ Alison Wonderland, and welcomed his first child, who was born two weeks after the trilogy wrapped. (Wonderland, nine months pregnant at the time, cameos in the film spinning records at a nightclub.)
“Weirdly enough, my first place in Los Angeles was also on Hollywood Boulevard,” West says, crossing the street toward Maxine’s second-story dump, which usually houses overstock from the Hollywood Suit Outlet next door.
He moved to L.A. in 2005 after wrapping “The Roost,” figuring the natural progression of things was to head west and write another script. Relocation was daunting. “There’s no real sense of where you’re supposed to live and who to send the script to,” he laughs. His first spot was quieter — “a little garden apartment, very L.A.” — but it amused him to get mail addressed to Ti West, Hollywood Blvd.
“I didn’t have an interest in telling that ‘Hollywood chews you up and spits you out’ story,” says West, on Hollywood Boulevard where the movie was shot.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Nearly two decades later, he’s lived and worked here for so long that he pokes fun at being that naive kid who hoped he’d be instantly handed the keys to the city. In truth, his ascent has been a grind. West kept at it, as did colleagues Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass Brothers, who also premiered films alongside “The Roost” at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, the year that mumblecore became a movement.
They were all “making very tiny movies,” West remembers. “I think that’s where the chip on your shoulder comes from: Why doesn’t someone just realize all the work I’ve been putting in? Why don’t they know that I’m up 19 hours a day, seven days a week, working on this thing?” He describes those lean, exhausting years like someone who’s scaled his share of mountains.
“But I came of age in the ’90s, when making independent movies was cool,” he continues. “Are the 25-year-olds sleeping on floors doing that now? Or do they want to be making influencer content? Probably I would have wanted to do that too because if it goes viral, you just jump ahead. If you’re trying to change your life, that’s a quicker path.”
“We were in the Old West town and I was like, ‘Ti, this is the coolest job in the world,’” says Goth. “And he looked at me like, ‘I know.’ And we were just so giddy.”
(A24)
West’s first climb when he arrived in town was a hike up to the Hollywood sign before more fences and alarms were erected around it. “I had to do it,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘Are they really going to arrest me?’” He hesitates, then chuckles. “Maybe the answer’s yes.” But he got away with it and was permitted to legally return while scouting for “MaXXXine” as he wanted to stage a showdown under the letters. For practical reasons, he was forced to rebuild the sign nearly to scale in Santa Clarita. Even so, the shoot was so tight on time and money that he had just eight hours to film at the duplicate site, including a lunch break and the commute up and down the hill.
“PTSD,” West mutters, flashing back to the hectic pace as he continues down Hollywood Boulevard and turns into the alleyway where Maxine gets menaced by a Buster Keaton clone. Every scene shot on the busy street — and there are a lot of them — had to be completed in four days, with the vintage store fronts mostly erected the morning-of to make sure the sets weren’t destroyed. When the film’s phony video shop went up, West’s phone buzzed with texts from friends who’d happened to drive by. A few asked if he was behind the fake signage; others mistakenly celebrated it as real.
“It’s just a circus at all times and nobody really cares that you’re shooting a movie,” says West, in front of the Hollywood Theatre.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“To turn this all into an X-rated area was a very big project, lots of neon,” West says. As he gestures toward the marquees of the Déjà Vu gentlemen’s club and the Vine Theatre (both seen in “MaXXXine”), a bus pulls up and unloads 50 or so Scientologists in matching navy skirts and trousers who politely ignore his descriptions of sin as they head into the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. West is also unfazed. “We had to be out here in the chaos of it all. It shows in the movie.”
Some days, he got lucky. West wanted an insert shot of Theda Bara’s star on the Walk of Fame as a nod to Pearl’s pet gator, and, magically, it was just steps from the Déjà Vu. Kevin Bacon, playing one of “MaXXXine’s” heavies, has his own star across the intersection, while Giancarlo Esposito, cast in a memorable role as Maxine’s agent, is embedded three streets to the east.
But this is also the block where an angry driver smashed through the barricades and crashed into a parked car in the middle of filming. The cops who were hired to guard the set had to abandon their posts in pursuit. West and the cast and crew held their positions and finished the scene.
“From making a movie here, I realize it’s difficult to get permits because the neighborhoods just don’t want movies shooting,” West says. “But it’s Hollywood. If there’s ever a reason to be in traffic, it should be because Will Smith is flipping a car in the middle of the street. Every other reason to be stuck in traffic sucks.”
West hopes to stage his next movie in a more controlled environment. He’s 40 pages into that script — “It will not be a trilogy, I assure you of that” — and already imagining the comforts of constructing a set that’s “meticulous and complicated.” He’s challenging himself to surprise audiences and top all three Maxine films combined. “That’s the goal: You put in the reps and you keep getting better.”
“She’s not trying to work for UNICEF,” West says of Goth’s Maxine Minx, “but I’m just trying to put you on her side in the movie so that by the end of ‘MaXXXine,’ you’re like, ‘I’m just glad she made it.’”
(A24)
But for now, he’s focused on getting people to root for the trials and tribulations of his marvelously wicked Maxine Minx. Right after the car crash, West and Goth hustled to film a scene of Maxine strutting the red carpet at Mann’s Chinese.
Eventually, “MaXXXine” itself will debut there too: an ’80s-chic world premiere with Angelyne parked outside in her pink Corvette and attendees dressed like Gordon Gekko and Sunset Strip metal heads. West wears a white suit jacket — “very ‘Miami Vice,’” he says — while his toddler sports “Risky Business”-style sunglasses and charms paparazzi by giving them a let’s-do-lunch-babe finger point.
That was a couple days ago and West is back with us at the Chinese’s autographed concrete, still finding his footing in the surreality of it all. He nods approvingly that the town hasn’t swapped out its shoe prints of classic stars for, well, Shrek.
“The movies aren’t going anywhere, because telling stories is how people communicate,” he says. Tenacious creatives like Maxine and Pearl and yes, even he and Goth, are now part of Hollywood lore. West exhales. “Maybe someday, someone will say, ‘I really like those old movies — like ‘MaXXXine.’”
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Travolta’s “Propeller: One-Way Night Coach” is One for the Ages — All Ages
Back in the good ol’days — the ’90s — John Travolta would love to get off the topic of “Michael,” “Pulp Fiction” or “Get Shorty” in interviews with film journalists like me and regale us with how utterly besotted he had been with his first flying experience, how that drove his passion for piloting and buying planes and airfield-adjacent luxury houses.
He didn’t even seem to mind having to move house when this or that development balked at him flying his Boeing 707 out of there on the way to locations.
Travolta would tell any journalist who asked that he was writing a kid-friendly book, “Propeller: One Way Night Coach,” based on his first flights as a child in old propeller driven airliners — cheap red-eye overnight treks with too many connections for your average jet age traveller to tolerate.
I remember picking up the book when it came out later in the ’90s — at an airport gift shop — and thinking “Well, that’s as cute as I figured.”
And now, decades later and trapped in the B-movie hell of his post “Gotti” career, Travolta’s turned that cute book into the most delightful, fanciful and colorful bon bon of a movie.
“One Way Night Coach” is a child’s fantasy of flight and flying the way it used to be — with pristine, uncrowded, futuristic airports, an early ’60s era of jets and prop planes with over-uniformed stewardesses in white gloves, the days “Back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham,” as Sideshow Bob memorably sneered on “The Simpsons’.”
It’s a fictionalized account of Travolta’s childhood about an only child (at least two Travolta siblings have bit parts in this movie) of a never-made-it/never-will actress/single-mom (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) who indulges her aviation-obsessed eight-year-old with a cheap cross-country overnight flight.
Little Jeff (Clark Shotwell) will revel in almost every Idlewild to Pittsburgh to Dayton to Chicago to Kansas City to Denver and Los Angeles minute. He strolls into the cockpit to meet pilots, charms the stewardesses and checks out the sleeping bunks on the TWA Lockheed Super Constellation, loving even the delays if not the Chicken Cordon Bleu he’s offered on legs of the journey that offer a meal.
And as he’s an observant child, he comments (Travolta narrates) on his 50ish mother’s vamping and posing, her choice of cigarettes (Newports) and drinks, the solo traveling men whose attention she pursues and earns.
“I was her best audience,” adult Jeff remembers of the mother who’d read him plays as bedtime stories and delusionally hopes that this trip to Los Angeles might be her “big break” even though she’s pushing 50.
“Hollywood called,” she’d explain about their overnight cheap flight arrangements to ticket agents and crew. “They told me to take the next flight!”
At every turn, Jeff meets or sees kindness — stewardesses who indulge his many questions and bump them up to first class on the mostly-empty planes, a captain who fixes his toy model of a Constellation, a mentally ill flyer who flips out but is calmed by a flight attendant who isn’t overworked and frazzled in jet-powered tin-can jammed with Joe and Jane Sweatsocks who think nothing of traveling in their pajamas.
Normally, I cringe at pictures this reliant on voice-over narration. I recoil from stars who populate their picture with Sandler etc. offspring. But “Propeller” is unfailingly sweet and never cloying.
Sure, it’s fictionalized. But if you’ve followed Travolta’s life and career, a lot of him is in this — his raptoruous engagement with flying, an indulged child who developed a taste for fine food and creature comforts, a mother who was his guiding star as an actor.
I get why there are less adoring reviews than mine floating around “Propeller.” It’s unfailingly sweet. Mom’s man-hunting is seriously dated. This TWA tale is decorated with Gershwin’s majestic “Rhapsody in Blue” — United Airlines’ signature tune. And Travolta’s been around long enough for recent generations to come up and not feel a connection to the “Saturday Night Fever/Get Shorty” star whose career has fallen off and life has been visited by too much tragedy.
But I’d hate to be seated next to anybody who doesn’t appreciate this adorable, pristine and nearly perfect aviation fantasy on any flight, much less an overnight one.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Clark Shotwell, Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Ellen Travolta, Ella Beau Travolta, Olga Hoffmann and John Travolta.
Credits: Scripted and directed by John Travolta, based on his book. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:01
Three years ago, Mattel Inc. struck box-office gold — or rather, pink — with the billion-dollar success of “Barbie.”
In its first return to theaters since the female-forward phenomenon, the El Segundo toymaker is turning to the brawny He-Man for another box-office lift.
Its latest film, “Masters of the Universe,” opens this weekend, as Mattel looks to build on that previous success and continue extending its signature toy brands into the entertainment arena.
“The movie is very much in tune with culture,” said Mattel Chief Executive Ynon Kreiz. “Everything is much more contemporary relative to what was created more than 40 years ago, but it’s still very true to the origin story and to the DNA of the brand.”
The new film arrives at a pivotal time for Mattel, which is facing pressure from investors to grow its business. The maker of Hot Wheels, American Girl and Uno has recently confronted a challenging market for toys, beset by tariffs on goods produced overseas and weaker-than-expected demand for Barbie dolls and Fisher-Price preschool products.
Amid uncertainty in the toy market and the fallout from tariffs, Mattel’s net income dropped 25% to $398 million in 2025. And since the company announced disappointing holiday sales totals in February, its stock has dropped more than 30%, closing at $14.34 on Wednesday.
“Masters of the Universe” toys at Mattel headquarters in El Segundo.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The share price slide prompted investor Southeastern Asset Management to send a letter last month to Mattel leadership suggesting the toy maker should sell itself and go private. Southeastern manages about 4% of the company’s stock on behalf of its clients.
“The frustration among investors has been the fact that if you look at the business from 2021 through 2025 and even this year … the business really hasn’t grown,” said Eric Handler, a Roth Capital senior media and entertainment analyst, referring to Mattel. “This is a company that needed something fresh in the portfolio, and there’s a wide range of investments being made, of which ‘Masters of the Universe’ is one part.”
Kreiz pushed back on the idea that the company is not growing. In the fourth quarter of 2025, net sales were up 7% to $1.8 billion, though the result was not as strong as the company expected.
Mattel has spent $1.2 billion in the last three years to buy back shares, with an additional $1.5-billion share repurchase planned for the next three years.
“We’re investing in our own stock because we believe it is undervalued,” he told The Times in an interview at his office, which has floor-to-ceiling windows that give an expansive view of El Segundo. “We absolutely agree that the share price doesn’t reflect the progress that we’ve achieved over the last few years financially, operationally, our place in culture, the strength of our brands, and the continued expansion of the business. And more importantly, the potential that we have down the road.”
“Masters of the Universe” is a key variable in that equation.
Ynon Kreiz, chief executive of Mattel.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The movie, which had a budget of roughly $170 million, is expected to bring in $25 million to $35 million in the U.S. and Canada during its debut weekend. That’s a far cry from the $162-million opening haul of “Barbie,” but box-office analysts say that film captured the cultural zeitgeist in a way that’s hard to replicate.
The ‘80s-era “Masters of the Universe” is “a property that was famous with a certain group of fans, but it hasn’t had much of a pop culture presence,” said Shawn Robbins, who directs movie analytics at Fandango and founded the forecasting site Box Office Theory. The movie has notched a respectable 74% approval rating from critics on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
“There’s been so many callbacks to nostalgic franchises,” he said. “Some people are always on board for them, and maybe the positive reviews bring people in who were on the fence. But people are also ready for something fresh and new and exciting.”
Kreiz said he’s often asked how the company will match the success of “Barbie.”
“The answer is, we don’t need to match ‘Barbie’s’ success for movies to have a meaningful economic impact on the company,” he said. “Not every movie will be ‘Barbie.’ If we create quality content that people want to watch and create quality experiences that people are engaged with, good things happen, and these brands will resonate and will be here for years to come.”
While theatrical revenue is important, the measure of success for “Masters of the Universe” could also include its eventual reception on streaming platforms and, of course, toy sales, analysts said.
There are hundreds of products tied to the movie, from collectible action figures of Nicholas Galitzine’s He-Man and Camila Mendes’ Teela, to branded Uno decks, Legos, clothing and skateboards.
Skeletor from “Masters of the Universe.”
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“For us, it’s a huge win already,” said Robbie Brenner, president of Mattel Studios and chief content officer, who also served as a producer on the film. “We have reinvigorated and relaunched this brand that has been around for decades … and done it in a way with just the best-in-class toys. Obviously that’s our bread and butter. And then to have made an epic, incredible movie … is a huge win.”
While Mattel does not yet have sales totals for its “Masters of the Universe” toys, executives said during an earnings call in late April that product sales were “growing double digits” amid strong customer demand, particularly from adults.
When Kreiz was named CEO in 2018, he saw the potential for Mattel to expand beyond toys. In an entertainment landscape dominated by known franchises and intellectual property, the former TV and media executive wanted to leverage the company’s IP in new ways to attract consumers.
Hence, Mattel has expanded into real-world experiences such as a Barbie pop-up at Coachella or a traveling Hot Wheels monster truck show. In February, the company fully acquired Mattel163 mobile game studio after buying out a stake held by Chinese tech firm NetEase. The studio has released games based on Uno, Skip-Bo and other Mattel intellectual property.
And on the film and television front, the Mattel Studios division now has 51 people — most of whom are based in El Segundo — focused on projects across platforms.
After “Masters of the Universe,” Mattel Studios plans to release a “Matchbox” streaming movie in October. The division has more than a dozen films in development that have been announced, including an American Girl movie with Paramount, Polly Pocket with Amazon MGM Studios, as well as a live-action Magic 8 Ball series from M. Night Shyamalan.
“The journey for the company was to evolve from being a toy manufacturer that was making items to become an IP company that is managing franchises,” Kreiz said. “It’s not that we’re not creating toys — it’s obviously a big part of our business — but the opportunity is to expand so much more than the physical product.”
“Masters of the Universe” was in development for years at several different studios before it was picked up by Amazon MGM.
That partnership stemmed from Mattel’s work on the “Barbie” movie with Courtenay Valenti, then president of production and development at Warner Bros. Pictures who is now head of film at Amazon MGM.
“Masters of the Universe” felt like a good property for Mattel to bet on because of its nostalgia factor and deep bench of colorful characters, from the green tiger Battle Cat to the heavily armored Ram Man and ever meme-able Skeletor, which the company hopes will attract new audiences, Brenner said.
The movie is directed by Travis Knight — chief executive of stop-motion studio Laika who also led the 2018 “Transformers” spin-off “Bumblebee” — who Brenner said “nailed” the narrative’s tone. (It didn’t hurt that Knight was already a fan of the franchise and had sported the He-Man haircut as a child.)
“It’s a property that’s kind of out there,” said Brenner, who grew up watching He-Man and his twin sister She-Ra. “It’s got all these crazy characters. But just riding that line between what is funny and kind of irreverent and then kind of heartfelt, that is a very hard thing to put in a blender and to get right.”
Let’s just say that the wedding band has never occupied the most exalted rung of the ladder in music.
Playing “September” and “Celebration” is often what’s most required. As one member of the Bride and the Groove, the band at the center of John Carney’s new film, puts it: They’re not rock stars. They’re human jukeboxes.
But in “Power Ballad,” a wedding band singer and pop star cross paths. For one night, all of the stratification of the music world falls away. “Power Ballad” starts like a fairy tale.
Since 2007’s “Once,” the Irish writer-director has focused his films on the redemptive capacity of music. Carney, who was once a bassist for the Frames, knows from experience. From “Sing Street” to “Flora and Son,” he has made unabashedly earnest tales where a song, or just picking up an instrument, changes lives.
This can, undoubtedly, lead Carney into sentimental territory. Lucky for him, his chosen subject — music — is more worthy of sentiment than almost anything else. Yet the song doesn’t quite remain the same in “Power Ballad,” a movie that begins with the gentle sweetness Carney is known for, but detours into something more discordant.
Rick (Paul Rudd) is an American musician who gave up on his once-promising rock band’s future to instead live with his wife (Marcella Plunkett) and teenage daughter (a spunky, underused Beth Fallon) in Dublin. His former group was called Octagon, a perfect former band name if there ever were one.
But for years, Rick has fronted the Bride and the Groove. It’s an unromantic day job (or rather a night one) that hasn’t entirely sapped his belief in his own songwriting. During an encore at one wedding, he plays an original tune and is mentally transported to an arena full of swaying fans. When he snaps out of it, he’s staring at an empty dance floor and faces that say: That wasn’t Kool & the Gang.
At another wedding at at a castle, the band is asked to let a friend of the newlyweds sit in. They reluctantly agree, and are surprised to see the very popular boy band veteran, Danny (Nick Jonas), step on stage. He sings Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” and it’s great. Though Rick had just dismissed Danny’s music as “manufactured content for young, excitable teens,” he discovers Danny is a genuine musician.
But, later that night, something even more remarkable transpires. Rick bumps into Danny, and the two quickly hit it off. They begin jamming together and sharing songs that need work. They are both so jazzed by their unlikely collaboration that they play into the next morning.
The actual moment of artistic creation, and the craft it requires, is something the movies almost always skip over. But capturing collaborative juices flowing is exactly what Carney excels at. You can feel his joy in it. So it’s fitting that one of the unfinished songs Rick plays for Danny, “How to Write a Song (Without You),” is about creative invention.
It’s here when you wonder where “Power Ballad” is headed. Is this, for Rick, the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Will they turn into the next great songwriting duo, lifting Rick out of weddings and proving to the world that Danny is more than a boy-band pretty face?
That is very possibly the movie Carney might have made a decade ago. But “Power Ballad,” which he co-wrote with Peter McDonald (who also co-stars as a band member), shifts six months ahead in time. Rick is standing in a shopping mall when the familiar lyrics of “How to Write a Song” softly float through the stores. He stands dumbfounded in the gleaming halls of commerce, a befuddlement that slowly turns into outrage the bigger and bigger Danny’s smash hit grows.
“Power Ballad” loses some of its steam in its second half, which follows Rick’s struggle for justice. Making things considerably harder is that he can find no recorded demo of the song. His family and his band don’t even really believe him.
But even as the movie struggles to sustain its opening refrain, Carney’s film is always riffing on ideas of authenticity and aspiration in music. That Jonas is, himself, a former boy band star who has at times gone it alone, lends the movie a direct connection to contemporary music, where tussles over authorship are increasingly common.
Jonas has been good in other films (notably the “Jumanji” movies), but this is his most ambitious and convincing performance to date. It’s a testament to the movie that Danny’s theft isn’t a purely villainous act. He gives the song a bridge and the vocal power to take it to another level. He’s under mounting pressure from his label to deliver a hit. An executive (Jack Reynor) wants “Danny 2.0” but has little faith he can supply it.
But it’s an even more well-tailored role for Rudd. He memorably and very goofily played a bassist in the 2009 comedy “I Love You, Man.” But while he sings well, it’s not his musical chops that lift the performance. It’s more that Rick, a contented family man with unrealized rock-star dreams, gives the exceptionally genial Rudd more notes to play as an actor. Rudd makes for a very likeable everyman out to convince the world he is capable of a beautiful song.
And that’s the abiding belief of Carney’s. No matter all the struggles, the artistic injustices, the corporate hegemony, he still believes that if you make something truly soulful, it will break through. It will claw its way to the surface, and move people. It’s undoubtedly gotten harder since “Once,” this movie seems to admit. The world is against you. But what one person can offer, a ballad or otherwise, still has power. Fairy tale or not, that’s worth believing in.
“Power Ballad,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout and some drug use.” Running time: 108 minutes. Three stars out of four.
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