Sing Street is a celebration of the impermanence of youthful ambitiousness, authentic music making, and the sensation of being smitten for someone. Despite that description sounding like every other movie that director John Carney has made on paper, that’s far from the truth as this is easily the best film he has ever done in his whole career so far; and easily one of the best films of this year.
Sing Street, first and foremost, is a coming of age film and it’s a story that must be very personal to John Carney’s heart. Born in Dublin in 1972, Carney would have been around the same age as our protagonist Conor (Walsh-Peelo) so it’s hard to view scenes of Conor and his family watching “Top of the Pops” in their living room, being inspired by the latest pop music and NOT imagine that Carney is re-creating his childhood on the big screen. Even if it’s not autobiographical, Carney manages to capture the unique viewpoint of school-boys growing up in a
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It’s not until the closing moments that the film sublimely tips its hand to reveal that and all the pieces start to fit into place, but it’s done so smartly and so deftly that we as audience members don’t realize it until the wheels are in motion. It’s not until the third act when the film blows all preconceived notion and reveals itself as a deeply affecting study of the adolescent mind. The two aren’t as much brothers as they are student and teacher as Brendan’s mental well-being seems to have been eroded away by living in his environment. I won’t give away the rest of the themes here but the way Brendan challenges and interprets his responsibility as an older brother is something else. However, while I know that Sing Street is a movie aimed primarily at teenage boys or guys in their 30s and 40s who remember being teenage boys, Conor seems to have zero familial relationship with his sister…I want to say