With SING STREET, John Carney goes three for three. Yes, a song can indeed save your life.

First Once. Then Begin Again. Now SING STREET. Filmmaker John Carney seems bent on proving to the world how important music is in all our lives. It certainly was in his own, as this latest and heavily biographical movie so buoyantly demonstrates. His first film used complete "unknowns" as its stars; his second tapped the talents of some very "known quantities" -- Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo and others -- and succeeded as well.

With Sing Street, Carney (shown at left) is back to using more "unknowns" again, and the film is every bit as wonderful as his other two. It'll leave you walking on air, feeling delight in both living and listening -- to a score that pays homage to some of the great groups of the 80s while creating original songs that are bouncy and beautiful, graceful and gorgeous -- all on their own. As an added perk, the filmmaker may have jump-started the careers of two young performers we're bound to be seeing much more of in time to come.

Critics, while almost unanimously embracing the film, have mentioned that its story is anything but unique. Starting a band from scratch is not the newest idea to hit music, films or life itself, for that matter. Yet so utterly specific is Mr. Carney as writer and director, and so interesting, funny, moving and real are all the characters he and his actors have created that it is not in the least difficult to imagine you're seeing all this for the first time. And loving every damned minute.

Carney cleverly places us first in the family situation, as we see our hero, Cosmo, a marvelous debut by young actor Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (who might possibly want to consider adapting a "stage" name?). He is shown above, right, with Jack Reynor, who plays his older brother and mentor, Brendan, with such richness, subtlety, range and skill that Reynor comes very close to stealing the movie.

Yes, there have been many movies about starting a band. But the reason for starting this one is certainly a bit different: to impress and then get to know a slightly older girl named Raphina.  As played by Lucy Boynton (above), a veteran of some dozen roles already, it will be this role, I suspect, that puts Ms Boynton firmly on the map. She's beautiful and charismatic, all right, but she also possesses that particular quality of seeming even more so when she seems to trying the least.

Together, Cosmo and Raphina make quite a pair, and the girl's history of troubled parentage and having already another boyfriend just adds to the pair's chemistry and the movie's suspense. Ditto the troubled relationship of Cosmo's own parents (played by Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) whose economics and intimacy are both spiraling downwards.

Each band member, even those given the least screen time, registers as special and real (that's Mark McKenna, above, right, as the band's smartest and most versatile member) -- and the school bully, too, has something interesting in store from the filmmaker. The songs, as I say, are just lovely. Best of all is the scene in the school gym/auditorium, with the band performing and Cosmo suddenly having a rather special and charmingly low-key-but-spectacular fantasy about everything he wants suddenly coming to fruition.

There are many high points in this wonderful film, but this scene, I think, reaches highest of all. It lets us know from where Mr. Carney is coming, and that, yes, for sure: a song can save your life. (I believe that last phrase was to be the title of Carney's second hit -- until someone had the lesser idea to change it to Begin Again.)

Sing Street, released via The Weinstein Company and running a just-about-perfect 106 minutes, opened to fairly rapturous reviews in NYC and L.A. a couple of weeks back. It opens across country this Friday, April 29. Here in South Florida, you can find it at the Gateway 4 in Ft. Lauderdale, the Regal South Beach in Miami Beach, the Cinemark Palace 20 in Boca Raton, and the Carmike Parisian @ City Place in West Palm Beach. Elsewhere? Just click here and enter your zipcode to learn the theater nearest you.

MY WAY: Vanity, thy name is Rebekah Starr, abetted by Vinny Sisson & Dominique Mollee

"Everyone told me this was a stupid idea," notes Rebekah Starr, the producer and star of MY WAY, which, though 2015 be young, wins the up-to-now unnecessary vanity production of the year. "Everyone," it turns out, can sometimes be right. The 'stupid idea' of Ms Starr's that the movie tracks is the road trip from a small Pennsylvania town to Los Angeles, where the lady is bent on making a "kick-ass" video featuring one of her band's songs, which turns out to be the titular "My Way" -- as though the singer/songwriter has no idea that title had already been used, and rather well, by a certain Frank Sinatra, about whom perhaps our heroine knows very little.

Suffice it to say that Ms Starr's "way" doesn't hold a candle to the well-known song penned by France's Claude Francois (aka Cloclo) and made most famous by Mr. Sinatra. But Starr's offering (the performer is shown at right) is indeed the song we hear the most throughout this tiresome movie, by the end of which you're ready to throw up your hands and scream, "Please, not again!" The problem here, to get right to the point, would seem to be that Starr has a huge need to recognized and famous but not, perhaps, any real talent to underpin that need.

So instead we get a terribly slipshod, slapshot little movie that tosses in everyone from Ron Jeremy (above) -- who is identified as a "Sunset Strip aficionado" (with that last word misspelled, above) rather than the famous porn star that he is -- to Rikki Rocket (below), who informs us that "the world needs a kick-ass girl band." Maybe. But I'm not at all sure that it needs this one.

Along the way, Starr, who narrates and is almost always center stage, tells us of her family history and its coal mining business, and her own work experience at same. Here, she tosses in some ersatz feminism (it's actually narcissism passing as feminism), giving us conclusions but almost no details that might help us agree with those conclusions.

We meet her husband (above, and now ex-), who smartly wants no part of this trip, and we meet and spend time with her women friends/band members: Temea, below, who can't accompany Rebekah on her trip, and Annika, shown further below -- who does, and ends up becoming the most interesting of the women we meet, and who for a time, at least, puts up with Rebekah's shenanigans a lot better than would I.

Overall and over time Starr impresses most as the kind of self-absorbed, narcissistic woman who, as we later learn, will spend money having her hair cut and colored but doesn't have the funds for Annika to do the same. Is this unfair, she wonders? (She also might have invested in a proof-reader who could spell Albuquerque, which appears as Albequerque, on the map showing our heroine's progress across country.)

Once in L.A., the pair hooks up with friend and drummer Holly, below, who definitely seems to be the most grounded of the women we meet.

At no time does this band appear to be particularly original or witty or intelligent or talented. Rebekah rarely allows us to see them in performance, and then, when we do, it's very brief. Later, we supposedly watch her go surfing. Except that, again, we don't really see her surf. The defining word here is shallow.

On (and on and on) it goes, one dumb cliche after another, until the movie begins to seem like a mockumentary. Suddenly tempers flare: "I just want to get through with this video and be done with her!" When the girls do finally perform at a the Sunset Strip club, they do the song 'My Way.' And then do it and do it until we're blue in the face.

Finally we discover what our Ms Starr has learned from all this. "The world proved to me that the world wasn't worth pleasing." Not to worry, dear: You haven't come close.

According to the IMDB, My Way originally ran 120 minutes. It has now thankfully been cut down to only 92 and opens this Friday, February 20, at the Arena Cinema in Los Angeles and a week later on February 27 here in New York City at the Quad Cinema.

DVD of the week: Todd Graff's BANDSLAM

TrustMovies has long been in love with the work of Todd Graff (shown just below), starting close to 30 years ago, when the then-
actor appeared on Broadway opposite Liz Callaway in the terrific (if over-pro-
duced) little musical, Baby. Graff was delightful: funny, moving, real and immensely talented. His work as an actor in films has been somehow disap-
pointing: Always good, he's not been used particularly well.

Writing and directing have put him on the movie map, however. He did the screenplay for Angie (the sweet, tart film that starred Geena Davis and gave James Gandolfini a first burst of recognition) and the unnecessary American remake of the classic Dutch Vanishing. But, ah, as writer/director he's come up with two winners: the splendid Camp, a one-of-a-kind musical based in part on Graff's own experience at a camp for budding musical theater performers, and now another musical of sorts called BANDSLAM.

Debuting theatrically last year to very-good-to-mixed reviews, the movie is just out on DVD. If you didn't catch it earlier (few did), now's your chance. Bandslam tracks a put-upon high school student from Ohio (Gaelan Connell, shown above, center) and his mom (Lisa Kudrow) who move to New Jersey to begin life anew. There he falls in with a gorgeous blond senior (Alyson Michalka, above, right) and a quiet-but-pretty brunette (Vanessa Hudgens, above left: yes, of those High School Musicals), and before long a new band is taking shape.

Graff knows kids; he knows music, movies and theater (the best of all of which he puts to use here); and he's smart enough to give us more and better than the usual high-school, kid's-stuff crap. His script is full of wit and charm, even if some of his themes (death & identity, for instance) cannot be properly developed in the film's 99-minute running time. And the band he creates is wonderful: not simply the usual electric guitars, but piano, cello, and a fab brass section, too. (I hope kids will listen and hear what real music can sound like -- and discover why this band really is the best of show.)

His cast, principals to those in small roles, delivers brightly (Kudrow, shown above, is wonderful; I'd like to have seen more of her.) Graff manages, as well, to serve up an smart finale in which the band does its best, and life still interferes. But this writer/director knows that winning isn't, after all, everything -- besides which, these days, there is always more than one way to win.

Give Bandslam a shot; it's available now on DVD from your video source of choice.  As for the things-to-look-forward-to department, the IMDB tells us that Graff's next project might be directing a remake of one of the great Broadway musicals Damn Yankees -- with Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal possibly attached, plus Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz in the writing department. 
We live in hope.