The Commitments

Alan Parker's The Commitments opened in 1991 and won the BAFTAs for Best Film and Best Direction in 1992, the same year it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing. It is adapted from Roddy Doyle's 1987 debut novel of the same name, the first volume of his Barrytown Trilogy (followed by The Snapper and The Van), and Doyle co-wrote the screenplay with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

Parker cast it almost entirely from Dublin musicians and actors who had never worked in film. Andrew Strong, sixteen when he was cast, came through an open audition and sings lead. Glen Hansard, then nineteen and a member of The Frames, plays the guitarist Outspan; sixteen years later he would win the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Falling Slowly from Once. Maria Doyle Kennedy, Bronagh Gallagher and Robert Arkins also appear, Arkins having been the original frontman of the real band put together for the film.

The soundtrack album reached number one in the UK and Ireland, made the top ten in the United States and went multi-platinum in several territories, which is rare for a record built on covers of 1960s American soul. The Commitments kept touring as a live band for years after the film came out. It is the founding film of a small but distinguished line of working-class Dublin music cinema, followed by Once (2007) and Sing Street (2016), and it is still the most fun of the three.