The ‘Sing Street’ Trailer Drops the Needle on the Soundtrack of Youth

Has there ever been a better time to be teenage, depressed, and listening to music than the United Kingdom in the ‘80s? The seedlings of New Wave and post-punk had been planted during the rollicking ‘70s, and the industrial dead ends of small-town life in the U.K. facilitated their germination into the thriving scenes in Manchester and London. Anyone coping with the myriad indignities of life in high school needed only to put on the latest record from the Cure and allow the melancholy to wash over them. The kids were not alone; they had Robert Smith.

One of those outcast whippersnappers obsessively cataloguing his vinyl was filmmaker John Carney, who’s now retelling the story of his own youth through the jukebox musical drama Sing Street, the new trailer for which has been embedded above. Carney’s avatar in the film is 14-year-old Dubliner Cosmo, a kid squished between a fiscally struggling family and a new prep school where the doesn’t-belong stench wafts strongly off of him. Young Cosmo starts a band (for the oldest and most worthy reason anyone has ever started a band — to impress a girl) with some of his lads after finding inspiration in the hits of A-Ha, Duran Duran, the Clash, and Spandau Ballet. Carney has been consistently vocal about his passion for music in his work, having already crafted Once and Begin Again as salutes to the unifying, therapeutic power of song. This teen coming-of-age tale will continue Carney’s running preoccupation with music, as the aforementioned bands lend their tunes to the performers in the film.

Musical nostalgia pictures can get stuck in their own sentimentality, and Carney’s deep personal attachment to the material might steer him into this territory, but the rickety let’s-put-on-a-show spirit of the DIY music video clips in the trailer looks fun. Audiences at Sundance next week will be the first to pass judgement on this new film, and though there’s no release date set as of yet, Carney’s film tend to have the easygoing indie spirit that lands them in early summer.