Sing Street, Growing Up, & The Choice to Live

 by Ian Sidney Lewis


"I really liked your song. It made me cry.”
"Oh. I'm really sorry."
"No! It's... it's a good thing."
 
– Sing Street (2016)

What does it mean to have a favorite movie?

Is it the movie that you know the best of every movie you’ve seen? Is it the movie that you’ve seen the most? Is it as simple as the best movie you’ve ever watched? I don’t know. They say that every film is somebody’s favorite and everyone has a different reason for having theirs. For a long time, I didn’t know what was my favorite, if I even had one, but I know what movie keeps coming back to my mind as I tried to write this, even halfway into an essay on a different film. I kept seeing its final scene, imprinted onto my mind, repeating over and over. That movie was Sing Street, a 2016 movie about a boy trying to impress a girl by starting a band.

Why, of all the movies I’ve seen over the course of my life, does this one stand out?

I don’t hear people talking about it. It wasn’t nominated for any Oscars and it’s not a cult classic phenomenon. It’s not unpopular - it was well-received, got a major theatrical release, and it made well more than its modest budget back. In the end, though, it never caught fire. It was just one of those movies people saw, if they saw it, and then forgot about. It didn’t change the world.

And why would it? It’s another boy meets girl story, with the remarkable twist that the boy, as a teenager, starts a band to stick it to the man and impress her. Really, it’s perhaps the most innovative premise that’s ever been conceived and has certainly not been driven into the ground, especially for a movie that came out in 2016. Just going off the premise – which I’ll admit, I am just as guilty as you in judging a movie for – it sounds like the most average, nostalgia-baiting coming-of-age story in the history of that illustrious genre. But it isn't. It takes what could be considered a generic premise and drags it into something interesting.

The film shoves us into the life of Conor Lawlor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), the teenage son of a failing marriage in the economically troubled Ireland of the ‘80s, as he is sent into a new school, Synge Street CBS - whose constant violence and authoritarian principal make it seem more like a prison than a place of education. Its wonderful supporting cast includes his idolized, dropout brother Brendan (Jack Reynor); his musically-talented and rabbit-obsessed bandmate Eamon (Mark McKenna); the authoritarian headmaster at Synge Street, Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley); school bully Barry (Ian Kenny); and the other half of the film’s romance, Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a sixteen-year-old model who Conor immediately falls for, asking her to play a role in his band’s music video - which leads him to actually put together the titular band.

There’s some of the funniest lines and visual gags I can recall, back-to-back-to-back, including my favorite: when the band starts imitating The Cure and Ngig, the only black member of the band, puts on whiteface to look goth, with nobody questioning it, a sequence which made me cry laughing. It displays an intense love for music and its power. I routinely listen to half of the soundtrack, banger after banger. The film keeps a generally drab, domestic palette throughout, further emphasizing when it chooses to break those confines and show some beautiful scenes. Most of all, it knows how to tell a story about a teenager, a story where all the embarrassing and sublime of youth is shoved together into one, perfect mixture.

The second half of this film, in my mind, is unimpeachable. After the band is formed, slowly becoming competent musicians while making gloriously inept music videos, Conor and Raphina grow closer and Conor grows more confident as an artist and a person. As Conor wears makeup and dyes his hair, he proudly points out to his headmaster that nothing he’s doing is against the rules which the man had emphasized earlier. When he refuses to remove it, the headmaster drags him through the hallways, shoves his face into a pouring bathroom sink, and nearly drowns him, mocking him as Ziggy Stardust before dropping him to the ground and leaving him there, ignoring his choked breaths.

This sudden burst of violence shatters our sense of safety as much as it does Conor’s. Even as we then move into further joy, as Raphina and Conor share their first kiss and the band books their first gig, we know we have already passed the veil. The world starts to show signs of depth. We learn of Raphina’s troubled home life, with a dead father and a mother in an institution, seeing her nervousness and her life beyond her place as a love interest. In the wake of their parents announcing a divorce, Brendan breaks his comic facade to deliver the best monologue in the film, lamenting the loss of his prospects and noting how he’s had to fight to clear a path for Conor to live what was once his dream.

It tears down the pedestals of childhood, whether it’s in the girl we have a crush on or it’s the cool brother we look up to or the adults in our lives we trust to have it together. We’re all human, all fallible, all people just trying to get by in a shitty world. Like Conor, we are slowly introduced to the fact that people are not the ideas we have of them in our head - each of them has hopes and dreams, wonders and traumas, wins and defeats. They’re all just people, trying to get by.

In the film’s best scene, the imagined music video for “Drive It Like You Stole It”, Conor fantasizes an idealized ‘50s high school dance that he’s seen in the movies, everything happy and saccharine - a world where his parents are still together, where Raphina actually shows up to see him, where his brother is cool and happy and strong. Then it cuts back to the dingey gym they’re actually practicing the music in, drab and gray and real, with Conor tiny in the frame. The dream falters into reality.

Sing Street forces us to confront that reality, to the dismal chances and the dreary world, and then, after some of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film, it shows that you don’t have to let that suffering consume you. In the words of the film, it shows us “happy-sad”. Beauty can come from suffering, but it is despite it, not because. We can create something beautiful and something meaningful, even if we live in a world that can be ugly and meaningless. That resonated with me.

This movie grabbed me, shook me, made me feel alive. It showed me that my life was in my hands. It showed me I could be who I wanted to be.

I mean, of course it would. I was fourteen years old when I first saw this, on a bootleg screener on a television screen tilted 45 degrees away from me. It’s hard to talk about what this movie is to me without mentioning where I was at that point, where I was struggling. I was depressed. I was numb. I was trying to find something to get me out of bed in the morning, because I felt like I was trapped in the same cycle, over and over again.

I remember watching this movie and feeling something indescribable. It made me feel like somebody understood me, like somebody else in the world was going through what I went through. When you’re depressed - in fact, whenever you’re suffering through something most people don’t go through - you look for any hint at yourself in the world. You look for a mirror that doesn’t make you cringe. Back then, I was desperate to feel connection with other people, whether they were on that screen or in the world around me.

I think that’s the point of every movie.

To make us feel a little bit less alone.

When we look up at the screen, what looks back is a mirror. We are Conor, heads in sinks, makeup streaked, seeing a little bit of us run down the drain with it. We are Raphina, trying to find something and someone to fill the void, terrified that we’ll end up like the people who failed before us. We are Brendan, lost and empty and failed, too young to be old but feeling old anyway, our only possession some piece of a future already lost to us. We are all of these things and we are the one sitting at home, staring at the screen, reading this, and we are the one writing this.

It’s been years since I first saw this movie, years since I got away from the worst parts of my life.

But I can still feel myself called to that final scene, to that boat on the Irish Sea, tossed about by the rough water. Raphina and Conor venture out for a dream, finally willing to risk themselves across the sea and in each other. Brendan cheers them on, giving Conor a couple lyrics, his dream living on in his brother. We leave them there on the sea. The future is a mystery to us, but we know that their choice was the right one. In the end, human beings are not meant for a cage. If we want to be happy, to be content, we must step out into the unknown, to take the one choice a person can ever make that truly matters and to try to make something beautiful.

We must choose to live. We must choose to try to live.

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