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For more than two weeks, around 300 immigrants locked up at Delaney Hall, an immigrant detention camp in Newark, New Jersey, have been on a hunger and labor strike, refusing to eat and refusing to work maintaining the prison for its operators, the GEO Group. They are not alone: Outside the camp’s chain-link fence, in an industrial area, their family members, loved ones, and a broader community of supporters have gathered and remained despite violence from ICE and the New Jersey State Police. As Gabriela Soto, whose husband was detained at Delaney Hall, told reporters a few days into the hunger and labor strike, their demands are to “close Delaney Hall and free every person in there.”Since the strike began, immigrants inside have shared four letters, published by Cosecha, an immigrants’ rights organization. “We feel vulnerable, in a way, kidnapped or detained without justification,” the prisoners wrote in one letter. They have reported being denied medications (one woman said staff told her that pain medication was “cosmetic”), being fed spoiled food, and being forced to endure outbreaks of illness across the facility, which has poor ventilation and does not have adequate medical treatment or emergency responders.Another letter, released on Wednesday, describes the opening days of the strike, when Delaney Hall administrators demanded to speak to its leader. “They were upset when we told them there was no leader and that the strike was a collective effort,” the letter recounts. In response, the letter continues, administrators retaliated against one person who had helped with translation, trying “to take him away in handcuffs, which all of us, seeing the injustice, wanted to prevent by peacefully blocking their path with our hands raised so that they wouldn’t take him away.” Next came “beatings, pepper spray, and from ‘ICE,’ a riot squad came up spraying pepper spray throughout the facility, causing many people to be rushed to the hospital.” That was on May 25. “To this day, we haven’t heard anything about those people.” Despite the violence, the strike has continued, as have similar strikes in GEO Group–run detention facilities in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.The conditions inside Delaney Hall, which are appalling, dangerous, and a violation of the rights of those detained, are entirely in keeping with how other such “detention centers” are run across the country; a recent AP investigation found hundreds of immigrant detainees reporting medical neglect in lawsuits across 33 states. The solidarity shared by people trapped in these camps, as evidenced by the multiple simultaneous strikes, makes sense; it has extended outside the camps, as well, with local groups working to shut down ICE facilities offering their support. The resulting crackdown on both striking detainees and their supporters tracks with all the other times Immigration and Customs Enforcement has harmed witnesses and protesters in the course of the agency’s carrying out Trump’s signature campaign of mass deportations. People coming together is treated as a threat by those running the camps because it is precisely the thing the camps are meant to break.“The opposite of a camp is community,” journalist and translator John Washington writes. He uses “immigration camp” to more clearly describe the dangers posed by the “hundreds of ‘detention centers,’ ‘processing centers,’ ‘holding facilities,’ as well as leased local jail and prison cells in every state of America.” He argues in his forthcoming book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches From the Fight Against Immigrant Detention (out in July), that the camp shapes our politics and our ways of making community. “A camp warps and degrades reality,” he writes, “both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them.” But for as long as there have been such camps, there has been resistance to them, including by those caged within. Camps are, after all, not abstract systems but the products of people’s decisions. “A camp is a long series of choices that need frequent reaffirmation,” Washington observes, and each choice is an opportunity to end, or at least slow, the camp’s operations. For one thing, camps need approval from myriad city, county, and state authorities; all stages of approval can be contested. As an example, Washington offers a site in Adelanto, California, where immigrants began a hunger strike earlier this month. The camp’s opening required sign-off from agencies such as the state’s Environmental Health Department, CAL FIRE, and the Native American Heritage Commission, among many, many others. That camp also needed permits for everything from native vegetation removal to signage to pollution discharge. As Washington added at the end of this list, each of the people who signed off “could have said no.”That work—researching, locating, and challenging each of these decision-makers—has been undertaken over decades by groups such as Detention Watch Network, which has identified points of intervention at each stage of immigration camp operation and expansion. Its tool kit on how to challenge ICE’s warehouse expansion details specific permits and ordinances required; venues in which those can be fought; and tools available to the public, such as zoning codes, environmental review, and litigation. As Trump’s mass deportations campaign took off, some national progressive groups have also taken up the fight against immigrant detention, such as Indivisible. Newer efforts have also joined, such as Project Salt Box, which uses public records to map out possible new camps and the money behind them. Detention Watch Network maintains a map detailing Trump’s camp expansion plan; few states are untouched. If you want to put a stop to immigrant detention, it is likely happening near you, whether in a private-run facility like Delaney Hall, a purpose-built camp like the one in the Florida Everglades, or more quietly, in a county or town jail leasing space to ICE.Among the many tragedies of Delaney Hall is the fact that it had already been shut down once before. GEO Group ran it as an ICE detention center from 2011 to 2017. It then sat dormant until GEO Group got a billion-dollar contract (over 15 years) to reopen in 2025. Not long after the camp took its first prisoners in May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka challenged it in court, in part on the grounds that it was operating without required permits or safeguards; after one attempted inspection, the city left a court summons on the camp’s chain-link gate. In response, GEO Group accused the mayor of engaging in “a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey,” that was meant to “interfere with the federal government’s efforts to arrest, detain, and deport dangerous criminal illegal aliens in accordance with established federal law.” At the time Baraka tried to inspect Delaney Hall, alongside three Democratic members of Congress, an event DHS characterized as the elected officials having “stormed the gate” of the camp, when video evidence shows clearly that ICE had let Baraka inside before forcing him out. Baraka was charged with federal trespassing charges, which were ultimately dismissed.Now, in this second round of working to close Delaney Hall, organizers are using some similar strategies as before. People have tried to stand in the way of ICE vehicles. Lawmakers have demanded site visits. Lawsuits have been filed, most recently by the state attorney general against GEO Group. If that company has “nothing to hide,” New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said in a statement, “and the conditions inside Delaney Hall are as safe and as sanitary as this private corporation and the Trump Administration claim, then there is no legitimate reason why my health inspectors are being kept from full access throughout the building.” She added, “I will continue using all the power of this office to advocate for the detainees and their families.” Mayor Baraka said this week that he would “expand” his existing lawsuit against GEO Group; he wants a judge to order the camp closed. But of all these efforts, the strike and the public support it has garnered seem the most disruptive to the operations of the facility. Last week, DHS issued a statement claiming that detainees’ reports of abuse and dangerous conditions are a “hoax,” and on X the agency denied that there even is a strike underway.But this is not a simple story of local officials defending their community against violent ICE agents and the private prison camp. Governor Sherrill—who, despite her statements to use “all the power” of her office, has not returned to Delaney Hall—last week declared the area a “peaceful protected protest zone.” This pushed people away from the facility, effectively negating their efforts to block ICE traffic, as independent journalist Talia Ben-Ora noted. Press access was likewise restricted, and had been challenged even before the zone was declared, with photojournalists seemingly singled out by officers; the U.S. Press Freedom tracker recorded 30 assaults on journalists by law enforcement in one week outside Delaney Hall. The governor has yet to meaningfully respond to these threats to both press and protest freedoms, which, arguably, she amplified. The governor also put New Jersey state police in charge of policing the protests. “I will not give ICE the pretext to expand operations in our state,” Governor Sherrill said when announcing these plans. “The state police were just ushers for ICE,” said one organizer at a rally in the New Jersey State House this week that was intended to push Sherrill to do more in defense of immigrants. After the launch of her “protest zone,” dozens of people were arrested. Press on the scene documented flash-bangs and tear gas used against protesters and themselves.These last two weeks of concentrated attention aside, people have been outside Delaney Hall for months now, offering support for those inside. They have welcomed and comforted family members who stood outside the facility in long lines in the frigid cold and in punishing heat for the chance to visit those inside. As people inside met repression when protesting conditions, mutual aid groups outside have too. Community media, such as Radio Jornalera NJ, have been reporting what’s happening nearly live in some cases, capturing in Instagram Reels people trying to make family visits, the aftermath of police violence, and moments when people are released. Their reporters have been there throughout the strike, witnessing, giving people outside a chance to share what they hear about people inside. The chain-link fences remain, but they have not severed the community gathered on both sides.

I love the summer. Growing up, it meant family vacations, beach days, block parties—really, what’s not to like? But for millions of Americans, the meaning of summer has been shifting. In many parts of the country, excitement for the upcoming season has turned into anxiety over the weather events—the extreme heat, hurricanes, drought, and wildfires—that have increasingly defined our summers in recent years.These weather extremes are not natural. They are climate disasters. And as a report published today by my organization, Public Citizen, outlines, they are exactly the kind of catastrophes that Big Oil companies predicted their fossil fuel products would cause—at the same time that they were orchestrating fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to block solutions that would have alleviated these harms.To put it bluntly, Big Oil is ruining summer.Naturally, the most obvious threat is the heat. The last three summers have been the three hottest ever recorded. Since 1985, 80 percent of U.S. cities have experienced an increase in the number of days with a heat index of 90 degrees or higher. This trend has already extended into 2026, with record-smashing heat this spring across the western half of the country, including an average national temperature in March that was an astounding 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the twentieth-century norm.This escalation in extreme heat isn’t a coincidence. A climate attribution study of the March 2026 heat wave found that it would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Nationally, scientists have found that the climate crisis lengthened the average heat wave season in the U.S. from 23 days to 70 days over the last 60 years. Another scientific study concluded that last summer, the average American experienced at least one additional week’s worth of risky heat days due to climate change, while 32 U.S. cities (home to over 21 million people) experienced 30 or more additional risky heat days. Scientists are increasingly able to determine the degree to which the emissions of particular oil and gas companies have contributed to particular heat waves. For example, a study published last fall in the prestigious journal Nature analyzed a number of major heat waves, including the extreme heat that hit the American Southwest in July 2023. The researchers found emissions from each of the biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP—made that lethal heat wave at least 10,000 times more likely to occur. They concluded that these events would have been virtually impossible without those emissions.And it’s not just that these companies contributed to the oppressive heat that is now defining summer for so many of us—it’s that they knew full well what they were doing. For decades, Big Oil companies internally forecast exactly how their fossil fuel products would drive increasing heat, and how we would experience these changes. In 1996, for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that colluded to spread climate denial, reviewing the science connecting climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” He discussed how the “elderly, sick, and very young” would be particularly vulnerable. And he explained the idea of threshold temperatures, referring to the point at which temperatures cross a critical limit “beyond which mortality rises significantly.”While the “thermal extremes” of recent summers have been bad, they occurred during a La Niña, the cooling phase of the Pacific Ocean’s heat cycle. But this summer is going to be different. Scientists expect that in the coming months the Pacific Ocean will begin its warming cycle, or El Niño. And this El Niño is predicted to be particularly catastrophic—again, largely due to climate change. Some studies have found that global warming may be leading to stronger El Niño events. More importantly, climate change means that this El Niño will build on a higher temperature baseline, which will have the effect of supercharging its impacts. That constitutes a dangerous cycle. As Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb put it: “Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again.”And it’s not just heat that will be supercharged this summer. Climate change is also causing a severe intensification of droughts and wildfires across our country, turning summer in many areas into a season of water rationing, air quality alerts, or worse.The U.S. already experienced its most intense spring drought ever this year, with the first three months of 2026 being the driest on record. Over 60 percent of the country is currently experiencing at least moderate drought. And in many regions, the situation is far more severe.Ninety-nine percent of the Southeast is in drought, with over 60 percent in severe to exceptional drought. This has spurred record-breaking wildfires across the region—Georgia has already had eight times as many burned acres so far this year compared to the pace of the last five years. The Great Plains region is facing similar challenges. Nearly 90 percent of Nebraska is in drought, and the region has already experienced record-breaking spring wildfires that burned over a million acres of land across Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. And in the West, extended drought is reaching a tipping point, following the lowest snowpack levels in a century. Utah recently announced a state of emergency over its water crisis, with the entire state in severe drought and 22 of 29 counties experiencing extreme drought. Colorado, which also relies on snowpack, may soon follow.These droughts, and their subsequent impacts on wildfires, are directly related to climate change. Climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau described the relationship this way: “Climate change is making the atmosphere thirstier. As it gets hotter, the amount of moisture that is pulled out of the landscape or sucked out of plants and soils also increases.” A 2023 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that almost 40 percent of the area burned by wildfires in the western United States over the last several decades can be attributed to the emissions of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. Speaking of the connection between climate change and increasing dryness that is contributing to wildfire growth, the author of the study said, “I’ve never had such a strong correlation in my data before.”Big Oil companies understood their role in enabling these climate effects decades ago. In 1981, Exxon scientist Henry Shaw wrote an internal memorandum to Exxon’s president of research and engineering explaining that it was “Exxon’s position” that a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels would result in “major shifts in rainfall.” In 1982, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a report warning that climate change would have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival since patterns of aridity and rainfall can change.” And in 1998, Shell confidentially predicted that if fossil fuels were not brought under control there would be “more droughts” that would “dramatically change” agricultural patterns and “disrupt eco-systems.” Shell even predicted that because of these changes, “conflicts would abound” and “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”Then there are summer storms. Hurricane season began on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted a worse than average hurricane season in the Pacific this year (combined with a below-normal season in the Atlantic, where El Niño generally suppresses the number of storms), forecasting between three and six hurricanes, including one to three major storms.Although hurricanes are not new phenomena, climate change is increasing their severity in several ways. Higher sea surface temperatures make hurricanes more likely to intensify—in fact, over the past 40 years, three times as many storms within a few hundred miles of coasts have intensified rapidly due to warming of the oceans. Storms are also staying stronger farther inland than they did in the past, with warmer sea surface temperatures leading to a “slower decay” of storms by increasing the amount of moisture they can carry. They are generating more rainfall, as well. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more water vapor that could fall as rain. For example, a study funded by the Energy Department looking at Hurricane Ida concluded that climate change was directly responsible for up to half a million people’s exposure to the storm’s floodwaters.Coastal storms are also becoming more dangerous due to rising seas, whose levels have increased eight to nine inches since 1880, and may rise multiple feet during this century. A study of Hurricane Sandy estimated that sea level rise increased the likelihood of flooding in that storm by 300 percent. Big Oil companies were fully aware that climate change would make coastal storms like these more dangerous. In 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather,” including “more storms” and “more deluges.”In fact, Big Oil companies demonstrated their understanding of and belief in these scientific conclusions by modifying their own infrastructure, often at significant expense, to prepare for the coming reality of worsening storms and rising sea levels. In the 1990s, engineers working for Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips noted in design specifications for natural gas pipelines that there could be a “considerable increase of the frequency of storms as a result of climate change,” even specifying for one offshore natural gas platform that an “estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters may be assumed” for the project’s 25-year lifespan.Even as these firms were taking action to protect their own assets from the climate harms they knew were coming, these same companies were engaging in massive disinformation campaigns to, as one fossil fuel coalition’s internal strategy document put it, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who championed anti-climate legislation when he was in Congress: “They lied.… It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.” One of these costs is the carefree summers of our past. Big Oil stole them from us. So over the next few months, if—or more likely when—you find yourself baking under the sun of a record-breaking heat wave that’s making it impossible to enjoy your favorite summer activities, or stuck inside because the air outdoors is dangerously smoky from wildfires near and far, keep in mind that this didn’t just happen. Our summers haven’t simply gotten worse. They have been made worse by specific companies that knew that what they were doing would ruin summer and went ahead and did it anyway. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

Even Crystal S. Carey, Republican general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, the federal agency that adjudicates labor-management disputes, thinks President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are screwing up her agency.Carey, who before Trump appointed her general counsel was a partner at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, didn’t put it exactly that way. In her prepared testimony Thursday before the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Carey took care to explain that the NLRB’s enormous case backlog rose to “unprecedented levels” under President Joe Biden. But that’s because congressional Republicans have been starving the NLRB of funds for 15 years, even as filings with the NLRB rise rapidly as American workers awaken to the fact that they possess labor rights. Trump asked Congress for only $285 million to fund the NLRB next year, down from $302 million when Trump entered office. Carey protested the NLRB’s underfunding but blamed it on neither Trump nor congressional Republicans. She did, however, say that she’d just learned the House Republican appropriations bill lowered Trump’s $285 million budget request by nearly one-third, to $200 million. That, Carey said, is “far below what we will need.”Under Trump, NLRB staffing has fallen to 1,151. As I noted earlier this week, there are graduating high school classes bigger than that. (“My high school graduating class was bigger than that!” Arnie Arnesen told me when I appeared Wednesday on her podcast.) In her prepared statement, Carey said:We continue to receive new charges every day, at record pace, all while we are 31 percent understaffed compared to 10 years ago when we experienced similar case intake. We are excited to have hiring authority to onboard nearly 100 new employees to the field this fiscal year. However, that number does not approach the number of employees we need to build an efficient and sustainable case processing system and fully staff our regional offices.Trump was president for four of the 10 years when NLRB funding was declining. And while it’s lovely to hear that the NLRB has a green light to hire 100 new employees, the agency has lost nearly that many (82) since Trump entered office, and it’s pledged to keep staffing levels static in fiscal year 2027. Should Congress further reduce NLRB funding to $200 million, Carey said, the NLRB will lose somewhere between 300 and 460 employees. That would shrink the NLRB’s staffing to somewhere between 851 and 691. The latter figure is smaller than the size of this year’s graduating class at McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Even as its staff is dwindling, Carey said later in the hearing, “We also, quite frankly, are going to have some space issues. There’s been a lot of GSA realignments over the past five years that have reduced a significant amount of space for us.” The GSA, or General Services Administration, allocates and manages office space for federal agencies. As I’ve noted before, much of the GSA’s time these days is devoted to selling extremely valuable real estate to private buyers at fire-sale prices in the name, preposterously, of thrift. Most recently, the GSA sold Washington’s Liberty Loan building, situated beside the Tidal Basin, for $17 million. That’s $98 per square foot, or about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed real estate market.Carey didn’t mention that Trump deliberately denied the NLRB a quorum for his first 11 months in office by firing the Democratic chair, in violation of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and that same year’s Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor (which the Supreme Court has signaled its intention to overturn for every independent agency except the Federal Reserve). Trump then waited until December 2025 to fill two vacancies and restore a quorum. While much of the NLRB’s work is conducted out of regional offices, putting the Washington-based NLRB on ice for a year didn’t exactly improve the agency’s efficiency.Trump filled one of the vacancies with James Murphy, a Republican staffer at the NLRB for nearly half a century before he retired in December 2021. Murphy is now NLRB chair, and, like Carey, he gave off a mild whiff of resistance at Thursday’s hearing. When pressed by Representative Summer Lee, Democrat of Pennsylvania, about whether the NLRB “must remain an independent agency” (i.e., not one subject to White House control), Murphy said: “As an operational matter, yes.” Lee further noted that an executive order on independent agencies that Trump issued last year required each of them to establish an office of White House liaison. Does NLRB have one? “Not that I’m aware of,” Murphy answered. Will he oppose establishing a White House liaison at the NLRB? If the president presses the matter, Murphy said, “I’m not sure what position I would be in to oppose that, other than to resign.”Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, is probably the most anti-labor member of the full House Education and the Workforce Committee, of which she was previously chair. She tried to get Murphy to agree that the case backlog was the fault of the Biden NLRB devoting too much of its energy to overturning precedents (which she called “ideological agenda setting”) and not enough to processing more routine “retail” cases. Murphy conceded that overturning cases took time and therefore diverted staff resources, which were already thin due to budget cuts. But “having said that,” Murphy said, “I want to emphasize that the massive case backlog currently pending at the board when I arrived was far more attributable, I think, to the loss of quorum, than to any other issue.” Translation: This is Trump’s mess.Murphy also got asked (by Education and the Workforce ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia): “Is the mission still at the NLRB to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining?” This was a reference to the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act. The precise statutory language is: “It is declared to be the policy of the United States to … eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining (italics mine).”  Republicans like to pretend this pro-labor language doesn’t exist, and to say instead that the NLRB should neither promote nor oppose collective bargaining (though of course they like it fine when it opposes). But Murphy gave the right answer to Scott’s question. “Absolutely,” he said of the NLRB’s mission to encourage collective bargaining. “It’s statutorily required.”Toward the end of the hearing, Representative Mark DeSaulnier, Democrat of California and ranking member of the subcommittee, told Carey and Murphy: “This has been a breath of fresh air. Forgive us, on our side, if we’re a little bit suspicious.” Militant servility to Trump and MAGA has reached such epidemic levels among Trump administration officials that Democrats are perhaps overly grateful to find any who talk like a normal human being. We haven’t seen Trump’s NLRB overturn any Biden precedents yet; Murphy affirmed at the hearing that, following NLRB tradition, he won’t do so with fewer than three votes. That can’t happen until Republican nominee James Macy is confirmed, bringing the board’s composition up to three Republicans and one Democrat.But Macy’s Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week. Friends of labor will likely find their affection for Carey and Murphy dwindle rapidly after that. 

As soon as Hollywood could talk, it could sing. Marketed as the first “talkie,” 1927’s The Jazz Singer centers on the son of a rabbi (Al Jolson) choosing between the family business and a life on the stage. He picks the latter, embracing modernity and finding his voice as a performer and a (secular) man. But finding your voice is not the end of the story, as the 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain underscores. The villain of Singin’ in the Rain is the shrill-toned Lina LaMont (Jean Hagen), a silent film star who demands to steal the voice of a mellifluous starlet (Debbie Reynolds). “I wouldn’t do that to her,” the studio chief protests, helplessly. “You’d take her career away. People don’t just do that.”Of course, people do just that, especially in Hollywood and specifically in Singin’ in the Rain, which itself includes instances of uncredited dubbing. But such hypocrisy has never stopped the Dream Factory from perpetuating stories of voices lost and found, the singing voice standing in for deeply felt, but also deeply monetizable, intellectual property. That’s entertainment!Irish filmmaker John Carney’s oeuvre is also about singing out, Louise, but his movies strike a winning balance between cynicism and sentimentality. Music is not a metaphor but the literal means of connecting with others and healing yourself in the process; music is also how we, as the audience, can hear characters changing, mostly for the better. In Once (2007), an Irish singer-songwriter (Glen Hasard) meets a Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová) on the streets of Dublin, and repressing their mutual attraction, the two develop a powerful friendship through collaborating on a demo.Likewise, in Flora and Son (2023), an unfulfilled single mother (Eve Hewson) bonds with her sullen teenage son (Orén Kinlan) and finds love with her guitar instructor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) after finding a guitar in a dumpster and signing up for online lessons. “It’s very intimate, isn’t it? Singing like that together,” Flora tells her teacher, flirtatiously. “It’s a bit like … we’ve made love or something.” As the two grow closer, their scenes are shot as though the two are in the same room, not falling in love over Zoom, because that is how it feels.But, in both these films, expression is not all; it must be backed up with craft and talent. When the guitarist in Once goes to get a bank loan to record a demo, the banker has his own dreams of music stardom. “I want to be me, I want you to be you,” he warbles. And after Flora’s guitar teacher sings her one of his original songs, “Welcome to L.A.,” she deems it “lovely” but adds, ruefully, “Would I wanna hear it again?”Characters like Flora and the unnamed leads in Once struggle financially and existentially: “This can’t be my narrative!” Flora insists, looking around at her crummy surroundings, her contentious relationship with her son, her broken marriage. But success introduces its own pitfalls to the creative person. In the 2013 Begin Again, nerdy, soft-spoken singer-songwriter Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) gets a taste of fame and immediately drops his long-term girlfriend and writing partner, Greta (Keira Knightley), to become a megastar who looks and sounds and, frankly, feels a lot like Maroon 5’s Adam Levine.There is more than one way, it seems, to lose your voice, and your way along with it.Rock stars “fall in love with the music,” grumbles the disgraced music executive (Mark Ruffalo) who discovers Greta at an open mic. “They fall in love with the lights, they fall in love with the road, the chicks, all that shit.” Greta is wounded by Dave’s infidelity but almost as much by his sudden lack of taste. He turns Greta’s song, “Lost Stars,” into a piece of what she calls “stadium pop,” and she resists the changes: “You weren’t supposed to lose the song in it, you know? I mean, it … it’s delicate.”There is more than one way, it seems, to lose your voice, and your way along with it.In Power Ballad, Carney’s latest, he revisits some of the same motifs from his own films—the Dublin–Los Angeles connection, the perils of fame, self-discovery through the power of music—as well as those tried-and-true cinematic tropes of voices thieved and recovered. He approaches these themes with his signature sophistication, in that there are no true bad guys, only better and worse ones. But this is also the most straightforward of his films, the most tidily resolved, the closest to a fairytale.Power Ballad’s meet-cute happens at a wedding, but not between members of the bridal party or during the bouquet toss. Rick Power (Paul Rudd) is the American frontman for a wedding band called the Bride and Groove; he has lived abroad for over a decade, having quit touring with his group to settle down with an Irish wife (Marcella Plunkett) and raise a daughter (Sophie Vavasseur). Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) is a friend of the groom and a former boy band-er whose solo career is floundering. The bride insists that Danny do a turn with the band, and the two men discover an instant rapport as they sing Stevie Wonder together. Rick is more talented than Danny might have expected, and Danny, in Rick’s words, is surprisingly “real.”The two stay up all night, smoking weed and jamming, helping each other with their songs-in-progress, which include thematically appropriate lyrics such as, “You’ll never find your voice if you don’t talk.” Rick shares with Danny his original tune, “How to Write a Song (Without You),” and Danny gifts Rick an expensive guitar. Six months later, while riding an escalator (an inherently demeaning mode of transportation for any adult man), Rick hears his song over the loudspeaker of a shopping mall.A parade of humiliation ensues. The song becomes a number one hit, Danny’s smug face as ubiquitous as his hit track. No one can remember Rick originating “How to Write a Song”—not his wife, his daughter, or his best friend (Peter McDonald, also co-author of the film’s screenplay). Rick cannot shrug off his boss’s continual reminder that he is a “human jukebox,” not a true artist; he is fired when he refuses to sing “How to Write a Song” at a bride’s request. For the promise of a life he has never had, Rick is poised to destroy the one he is currently living. How far will he go to get what he feels he is owed? And how long will it take him to realize what he wants—to be famous but rooted, to have lived two lives, to go back in time—isn’t possible for any of us?Cheerful, boyish Rudd looks his age here; his frustration and anger come through in every wrinkle, every bruise, on his famously ageless face. He’s mad at the world, but who can blame the world, when the song is so damn catchy? It’s a true power ballad in the key of ’80s romance (which Rick would have lived through, Danny not yet a twinkle in his mother’s eye). Unfortunately, “How to Write a Song” is the film’s only memorable original song, but, fortunately, it hits differently as the film progresses. It is an earworm that turns into a panic-inducing beating heart beneath the floorboards. You’ll bop along to the beat, simultaneously dreading its arrival more with each replay.A good song “has the ability to mean many different things to many different people,” Rick explains. For us to make peace with the song, to enjoy it for what it is, Rick will have to go first.Carney’s films always rely on a keen sense of place, and Power Ballad is no exception, from the band’s cramped living quarters and the grungy duplex exteriors of the Crumlin neighborhood to the smooth, glassy surfaces of Los Angeles. These set pieces seemingly indicate Rick’s and Danny’s lots: Rick has ground out continual disappointment, as Danny has moved through the world frictionlessly, almost floating to the top of the charts, where a mansion with a view awaits.When music becomes the means of communication between mothers and children, prospective lovers, close friends, the melting of their voices stands in for a whole lot of talking. It is never so simple, though, with Carney. Danny is isolated and under pressure; he isn’t a good guy, but he wishes he was. He does not lift the song unaltered, and, in some ways, he even makes it better or, at least, his own. It is the nature of fame, not malice, that backs Danny into a corner, forcing him to claim sole authorship. At the pointed prodding of his manager, impeccably inhabited by Carney regular Jack Reydon, Danny fumbles each opportunity to right his great wrong. Sure, it would have changed Rick’s life to have gotten the credit for “How to Write a Song,” but it would have changed Danny’s life if he hadn’t taken it for himself.Were circumstances different—the pressures on Danny less intense, Rick’s and Danny’s social circles more proximal—the two would have made great friends and even better musical partners. And had that been the route that screenwriters Carney and McDonald took, it would have left more room for the particular charm baked into Carney’s previous features. When music becomes the means of communication between mothers and children, prospective lovers, close friends, the melting of their voices stands in for a whole lot of talking. Conversation becomes unnecessary if the other person can write the next line of your lyric, picking up where you left off, suggest a wandering melody for the bridge; this is Carney’s great gift as a filmmaker, and, while it is the instigating event of Power Ballad, it is not where the film’s heart lies.It is Rick’s journey, as he learns to appreciate his ordinary life, that forms the film’s emotional arc. His negotiations and epiphanies involve the people he loves and with whom he does not sing. A lot of telling, and a lot less showing, ensues. The ending is satisfying, even moving, even if the musical montage that gets us there isn’t quite as powerful as it might be (a refrain of “How to Write a Song,” of course).The conclusion of Rick’s story is more neatly resolved than Carney typically permits, and fans might miss the open-ended optimism and subtleties that make his other films so special. Diverting but not unforgettable, Power Ballad is lovely—but would I wanna hear it again?

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