The ’80s were absolute shit, but Sing Street, opening Friday (April 29), will make you miss them anyway. Writer-director John Carney’s love letter to his own youth in Dublin is tremendous fun, and affectionate and clear-eyed in roughly equal measure. There’s the ring of authenticity to its tale of a teenage band and its members’ architecturally impossible hairdos, and there’s truth in the position, as expressed by one of its older characters, that possession of a Phil Collins record is grounds for never getting laid. Carney’s depiction of a Catholic school governed by sadistic priests and terrorized by a beetle-browed skinhead will be no less resonant to anyone who was there.

“It was all a huge learning curve for me,” says Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, who definitely wasn’t there. There’s a hefty 15-year gap between the film’s period (1985) and the birth of its star, who was forced into a diet of ’80s music videos after Carney snapped up the nonactor for his debut role.

“There are some gems, but there’s lots of pretty random stuff, too,” is Walsh-Peelo’s eminently reasonable verdict, as he speaks with the Georgia Straight from Toronto. He gives the thumbs up to M’s “Pop Muzik”, anything by Madness (“They had some deadly videos!”), and “Rio” by Duran Duran. But he also learned the hard way that history provides no real explanation for Thomas Dolby.

“ ‘She Blinded Me With Science’? Absolutely mental. I didn’t know what to think of that when I saw it at first,” he says (before bellowing “SCIENCE!”).

“The way I look at it, it’s the last time people went really far to try to be as original as possible. I think after that—the ’90s, and then we hit the millennium—we started taking ideas from the past rather than try to create something totally new. Guys were putting on makeup and challenging sexuality, you know?”

Sing Street does a marvellous job of capturing the era’s clunky attempts at androgyny and its clunkier way with
a melody. Carney also hits the nostalgia button hard with the band’s first homemade video, shot on VHS with too many Dutch angles and set to a brilliantly faked song called “The Riddle of the Model”. But it’s Walsh-Peelo who holds it all together as Carney’s alter ego, Cosmo. A recently inked contract with WME (William Morris Endeavor Entertainment) is the 16-year-old’s reward, not to mention something of a vindication for Carney.

“To be honest, I have no clue,” Walsh-Peelo answers when asked what his director saw in him. “Himself? I don’t think he wanted an actor. I think he really had his mind on a musical guy who hadn’t acted before. And maybe he saw that I’d be able to handle it, because when I was 14 I think I was pretty streetwise. I was busking in town all the time, and I was able to look after myself. And I think he was just thinking that I’d be able to cope with it all.”

Well, he was right. “Nah,” Walsh-Peelo demurs. “He just did a great job telling me what to do.”