Sing Street

Sing Street (2016) is about a boy forming a band in Dublin in 1985, and the reason he forms it is a girl. Conor's family has run out of money; he is taken out of private school and put into a cheap state one. The school is hard; the priests hit and the boys hit. A girl stands across the road, and he approaches her and tells a lie: I have a band, will you be in our video. Then he has to form one. The best thing in it is how the band develops. Each new song sounds like whichever band they saw on television that week: one week Duran Duran, one week The Cure, one week Hall and Oates. They find their own sound by imitating, and the process is shown correctly. The second story is his brother Brendan. He dropped out of university, sits at home listening to records, and teaches his brother about music. The emotional weight is his: he is making his brother do what he could not. John Carney directed; it is counted as the third of his music films after Once and Begin Again. The songs were written for the film and the boys genuinely play and sing. There is a school dance sequence that takes place in Conor's imagination, with the real and the imagined standing in the same scene. The period texture is deliberately narrow: a video recorder, cassettes, a television programme, emigration notices. The last scene is left ambiguous and causes argument. It runs 106 minutes. Good for: music films, coming of age, and Irish cinema. Less good for: there is domestic violence and bullying at school, and the ending is too optimistic.