A Star is Born

Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Director: Bradley Cooper

Quick Impressions:
I love Lady Gaga. It amazes me that not everyone feels the same way. Her immense talent is so self-evident. I remember first listening to her stuff around the time my nine-year-old was born, and I was drawn to her music immediately. My baby liked it, too. All her early pop/dance music is extremely catchy, but it was something more than that. Her songs all had this intriguing quality of not being terrible. As a rule, my husband likes pop much more than I do. I can tolerate it, and sometimes I like certain songs, but I remember frequently complaining about pop in the early 2000s, “These songs are pointless and insubstantial,”a hollow mockery of pop in, say, the 1980s and early 90s.  I’m the farthest thing from an expert on music, so please don’t be offended by my melodramatic (and potentially baseless) opinions.  (When I was in grad school, my sister burned me a mix of Michael Jackson and Madonna, and after dancing around the house to it for a while, I’d switch to the radio and think, “I’d better switch back to the CD.”)

But I genuinely enjoyed listening to Lady Gaga’s music. I sought out her songs and could be quite content to drive around listening to nothing else. (How can anyone not fall in love with charming lyrics like, “I’m bluffin’ with my muffin”?)

Then my sister kept sending me links to interviews and public appearances that delighted me increasingly. (My sister’s the cool one.)  And over the years as Gaga continued to evolve, my appreciation for her and her music only increased.  (I wrote three paragraphs of examples before I realized that the point of this section is to reveal my bias in favor of Lady Gaga, not to convince you that I’m stalking her.)

Now I’m not saying this next thing to sound ironic or provocative. I just genuinely mean it. Lady Gaga makes perfect sense to me. People (still, bafflingly) call her weird all the time, but she’s one of the few people in the music industry I find relatable and appealing. I like her. (And you can ask my daughter. I’m not easy to please. I’m always saying things like, “I like her music, but I’m so scared of her,” or, “She smiles too much. Why is she always laughing? I’m not sure she’s from this planet.”) But Lady Gaga just strikes me as profoundly normal (not average, mind you, exceptional, unusual but) about the farthest thing from strange.

When I heard that Bradley Cooper wanted to cast her in A Star is Born, I thought, “What a brilliant idea!”  Yes, the movie had been made three times already, but that’s kind of the point. She is the reason to remake it again. Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Lady Gaga. She’s the perfect fit.  Without her participation, there would be no reason to remake the movie right now. I mean, certainly others have the star power and singing chops to pull it off (Beyoncé, Adele), but the others don’t make another iteration of the movie seem necessary.  Lady Gaga does.  There’s been no more perfect fit since Cinderella’s glass slipper.

As soon as I heard about the project, I thought, “Wow! Bradley Cooper is a genius. ‘I’d like my directorial debut to be a feature length film in which Lady Gaga sings all the time!’  Who wouldn’t like that?”  As directorial debuts go, this is a really solid plan (though, granted, it had the potential to backfire spectacularly).

Speaking of Bradley Cooper, I’m a fan of his, too. I loved him in Silver Linings Playbook. Jennifer Lawrence won the Oscar (deservedly), but I loved Cooper’s performance more. I found his character incredibly sympathetic, his portrayal of someone struggling with bipolar disorder spot on. And if people are going to form ideas of what someone with bipolar disorder looks like, I’d rather they envision Bradley Cooper than whatever random, deranged murderer the news is currently hyping.

All that said, I found the theatrical trailer for A Star is Born kind of vague and bland (except for Lady Gaga’s singing voice). I wondered if the movie itself could give us something more deserving of all the hype.

The Good:
It does. The first act of A Star is Born is so vibrant and entertaining that it made me hope Lady Gaga makes more movies. When you think of a good lead for a romantic comedy, Lady Gaga is not typically the person who comes to mind. But maybe she should.

She and Cooper have this seemingly effortless chemistry. Their early interactions are absolutely charming to watch. The power of Gaga’s voice may be suited to some grand epic tragedy, but as it turns out, she does not actually need her singing voice to light up the screen. She’s a good actress, lots of fun to watch, vivacious and compelling.

I liked Cooper, too. (Weirdly, the first few times he sang, I kept imagining Rocket singing. That’s not Cooper’s fault. I don’t know why that kept happening. I never picture Cooper when I hear Rocket!)  He has a surprisingly good voice for someone not known as a singer.

I’m positive that the two of them are shoe-ins for Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Actress. I haven’t seen much of the competition yet, but based on the strength of these performances, I’m positive they’ll be in the final five.  (Plus the plot is bound to appeal to actors.)

Now how would I compare Lady Gaga’s work here to Glenn Close’s much lauded turn in The Wife? I don’t know. That’s trickier.

I will say this. In a very early scene, Lady Gaga’s Ally performs “La Vie En Rose,” and her performance is so powerful that when she finished, I had to check the impulse to leap to my feet and start applauding. At the very least, I wanted to cheer or something, as if I were there among the crowd watching her perform.

“This is absolutely amazing!” I thought.

But then I had to remind myself, “Of course, we already know that Lady Gaga is a great performer.” Her ability to perform a rousing musical number was never in question. I mean, she could keep that up for two hours and has in the past.

I don’t know how to compare her to Close, but I will say that Gaga’s acting is extremely appealing. There’s a natural quality to the way she plays the character. But then, of course, she is playing a talented singer/songwriter with atypical beauty whose life is transformed by a meteoric rise to fame. That’s not exactly a stretch. She is awfully believable in all her intimate conversations with Cooper’s character, though, and those moments are about human connection, not entertaining an audience.

In fact, all of my favorite parts of this film focused on Ally’s non-musical moments. I love all the stuff with the drag performers and the frozen peas (are they peas?) and especially what happens at the awards ceremony.

Probably the best (and to me, somewhat unexpected) aspect of the movie is that both Jackson and Ally are (and remain) such likable characters.

Here I’ll confess that while I’ve been aware of all three previous incarnations of A Star is Born for as long as I can remember, I’ve never seen a single one of them. I have no idea why (possibly because my mother doesn’t like them, though “Evergreen” from the Streisand/Kristofferson version was performed at my parents’ wedding). I know the basic premise is the same in all four movies, i.e. a new star is discovered and goes on a meteoric rise to fame while an old star struggles with addiction and fades into obscurity.

Having seen a lot of biopics about entertainers struggling with addiction, I assumed fame would go to Ally’s head, Jackson would self-medicate his jealousy, and their relationship would be torn apart by bitterness. That is not what happens at all, which was a very pleasant surprise for me.

I really like the way the movie portrays Jackson Maine. He’s a good (albeit damaged) man with a drug/alcohol problem. Ally correctly labels addiction as a disease. Despite his weaknesses, Jackson is a good person who genuinely loves his wife and almost always treats her kindly.

There are other interesting relationships in the film besides the Jackson/Ally romance, too. Sam Elliott gives a very strong performance as Jack’s older brother, and he seems likely to get some Oscar love, too, though the brothers’ conflicted dynamic interested me less than the central romance. I was also astonished to learn that Ally’s father is played by Andrew Dice Clay. For some reason, I thought he was dead.  Then I remembered that I recently saw him in Blue Jasmine and had the same reaction at that time, too.  (“Andrew Dice Clay!  I thought he was dead!”)  Ally and her father are an interesting pair, too, and I have a lot of questions about Ally’s mother that will, apparently, go unanswered.  (All I know for sure is the next time Andrew Dice Clay makes a movie, I’ll cry out in shock that he’s not dead.  I guess I need to watch more TV.)