ABSTRACT
Since its release, The Commitments has been increasingly legitimated as an Irish film, despite its British and American production history. The film, book, and soul music’s popular reach has meant the expansion of The Commitments as an evolving musical entity beyond the film, with some members of the cast performing on the live music circuit, Roddy Doyle adapting his novel as a West End musical, and Jim Sheridan directing a radio play for the BBC. Many young people in minor roles, in front of and behind the camera, went on to further their careers in the Irish film industry and beyond, and the film’s role in launching Irish creative careers has been later acknowledged. The film provides a blueprint for the Irish youth musical, including The Last Bus Home, Once, Sing Street, and Dublin Oldschool, which all similarly posit music and youth subcultures as resistant to Ireland’s socially conservative church-state hegemony, even as Ireland enters into a more secular present. Glen Hansard’s appearance in Once as a busker functions as a reiteration of his role in The Commitments, in a starkly transformed, economically prosperous Dublin. What is striking about The Commitments now, given the extent of economic and social change in Ireland since its release, is its exuberant disregard for authority, as well as its sincerity of aspiration, laced with caution, which prefigure the major cultural shifts of the 1990s and the waning power of the Catholic Church.
