Sing Street is likable but falls far short of the standard Carney set w/ Once

John Carney's 2016 Dublin-set film, Sing Street, is a reprise, of sorts, of his success with the amazing and enthralling Once from about a decade ago. Like Once, SS is about aspiring musicians in Dublin, but in this case they're not near-pro buskers but high-school kids in a tough Xtian Bros academy; as in so many such movies the band members are social misfits and outcasts who come together over their music. The strength of the movie is the charm of the young musicians, watching them change and evolve, watching them take on the school bully and the tyrannic school principal, watching the lead singer pursue the unattainable beauty, and watching him find his separate piece and navigate the shoals of family tension, divorce, and the failure of his once-promising older brother, now lost to the fog of hashish. That's all to the good, but what doesn't work so well is: the amazing transformation of the eponymous band into a really fine David Bowie/punk Anglo-Irish rock group ca 1985 (the time period of the film), watching the bully w/out much pushback give up his ways and sign on as the band's roadie, and mostly watching the lead singer actually get the unattainable girl, who is much too old and sophisticated for him, and watching them head off together for a new life in London - at all of 16 years old - a completely absurd and unneeded ending. Any comparison w/ Once may be unfair, as that film's ending was bittersweet and fully credible rather than contrived; another more fair comparison may be with the fine Swedish film We are the Best, in which a (girl) rock band found some success, even though their performances are pretty awful, but at a high-school gym level - it's much more true to life about their relationships and their talent levels. Sing Street, for all its flaws, is still very likable and watchable, but it could have been so much better if Carney had thought about how to make this story seem at least a tad realistic.