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Review: ‘A Star Is Born’ Brings Gorgeous Heartbreak

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‘A Star Is Born’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Bradley cooper narrates a sequence from his film, in which he stars with lady gaga..

“My name is Bradley Cooper, and I co-wrote and directed “A Star Is Born.” So we’re at the beginning of the movie now where the two characters just met, and this scene is really the anchor for the rest of the film. If as a filmmaker I don’t securely plant the audience in these two people and their relationship, then the rest of the movie won’t work. When I first went to Hollywood and met some people that were really famous, and I remember going out with them in the night. And their access to stuff is always very interesting. But the other thing that always blew me away is to see somebody like that in a pizza place at 4:00 in the morning with regular people, or at a grocery store. You’re like, oh, they go to these places too. I always found that very thrilling. And this, I wanted to feel like you’re in real time, almost, with these people. That was the only way I could get my head around the fact that you would actually believe that they’re falling in love, is that you need to see these moments sort of broken down into three things. One is the first visual look that two people have. And then there’s the tactile moment. And then it’s revealing their souls to each other. And in my life, having met people and fallen in love, it usually happens when you feel as if someone’s seeing you in a way that no one else is seeing you. And this is the scene where she’s seeing him in a way. And the movie’s showing you him take in that knowledge.” “(SINGING) Tell me something, boy. Aren’t you tired trying to fill that void? Or do you need more? Ain’t it hard keeping it so hardcore?” “Is that me?” “That’s you.” “You just write that now?” “Yeah.” “It’s pretty good.” “Her, from the very beginning of the movie, the movie knows she’s a star before she does it. And the movie’s almost searching for her. And with this scene, when she stands up and starts singing, the camera’s over her shoulder looking down at him.” “(SINGING) I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in. I’ll never meet the ground.” “So she’s in this empty lot at 4:00 in the morning in the outskirts of Los Angeles, and Jackson Maine, this very well-regarded musician, is one of her fans, almost like a boy. So I really love that shot of him just looking up at her.” “(SINGING) — shallow now.” “And what was great about when we found that location was it functioned as almost a stage. There’s all those lights behind her, as if she’s up on a huge stage at Coachella or something without even realizing it.” “I think you might be a songwriter.”

By Manohla Dargis

• Oct. 3, 2018

“A Star Is Born” is such a great Hollywood myth that it’s no wonder Hollywood keeps telling it. Whatever the era, the director or the headliners, it relates the story of two lovers on dramatically differing paths: a famous man who’s furiously racing to the bottom (Bradley Cooper in this movie) and a woman (Lady Gaga) who’s soaring to the top. This latest and fourth version is a gorgeous heartbreaker (bring tissues). Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema. That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.

[Read our updates on the 2019 Golden Globes and see the surprises and snubs .]

Like the last iteration, the epically (empirically!) terrible 1976 remake with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, the new one takes place in a contemporary music world that is by turns exciting, suffocating and crowded with dangers — ravenous fans, crushing performance demands, celebrity itself. This is the world that has helped create and come close to ruining Jackson Maine (Mr. Cooper), a country-rock musician who, when the movie opens, is performing obviously wasted, leaning and nearly falling into a boot-stomping song. He’s a beautiful ruin adrift on an ocean of booze, one he routinely spikes with pills.

A singer with a voice that can thunder, Ally Campana (Lady Gaga) becomes Jack’s safe harbor, taking on the roles of lover, partner, muse, ideal. That’s a heavy burden, but Ally is one of life’s chin-up survivors, with an errant mother and a loving, larger-than-life father, Lorenzo (a terrific Andrew Dice Clay), whose dreams cloud her own. Dad runs a limo business out of their Los Angeles home, where his male colleagues (Barry Shabaka Henley, among others) and their boisterous camaraderie fill the rooms, both warming and crowding them. Ally is accustomed to navigating around men larger than she is, elbowing past them to be seen and heard.

She and Jack first meet late one night in a Hollywood drag club where she sings after her waitress shift ends. Jack has just finished playing a concert and, after polishing off a bottle of booze, has stumbled into the club for more. There he watches Ally belt out the Edith Piaf standard “La Vie en Rose,” in a sheath and upsweep, her arched artificial brows adding quizzical punctuation to her face. In a swoon, he invites her out that night, and, as flirtation gives way to deeper feelings, they fall in love. He brings Ally onstage and then on tour, but she eventually goes solo, becoming a star whose ascent is shadowed by his decline.

[ Read about “A Star Is Born” and male sacrifice . ]

Mr. Cooper, who also directed, does a lot right in this take on “A Star Is Born,” beginning with the casting of Lady Gaga, whose disarming, naturalistic presence is crucial to the movie’s force. A post-Madonna pop artist known for her elaborate stagecraft and costumes, she has been stripped down here, her mask removed. You can see her skin, the flutter in her veins, which brings you close to her, and can make both the actress and her character feel touchingly vulnerable. This unmasking of Lady Gaga also makes Ally seem genuine, authentic, a quality that the movie champions and that serves as a kind of thematic first principle.

Soon after Jack and Ally meet, he peels off one of her fake brows — he’s flirting, but he’s also saying that he sees the real her and wants the world to as well. Playful yet unapologetically earnest, this scene inaugurates a seduction — of Ally, of us — that lasts the exhilarating first hour. Mr. Cooper understands the power of big-screen myths, including thunderstruck love and near-magical lucky breaks. He also understands his own star appeal (he gives himself plenty of heat-stoking close-ups), which dovetails with his role as director. When Ally and Jack look at each other, you’re watching two people fall in love, and it’s a contact high. You’re also watching a director guiding — creating — his star as life seeps into fiction.

Mr. Cooper’s smartest decision, other than casting Lady Gaga, is the absolute sincerity with which he’s taken on this material, in all its gorgeous, gaudy excess. He has refurbished the story some and added a bit too much psychological filler, but he has stayed true to its fundamental seriousness. Winking at this story would have been easy, but would have destroyed it. Instead, working from a script he wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, Mr. Cooper has gone all in with big emotions and cascades of tears. (The movie owes a debt to, and nods at, the original 1937 film as well as the 1954 remake with a peerless Judy Garland.)

Part of what’s exciting about this “A Star Is Born” is that Mr. Cooper knows he’s telling one of the defining Hollywood stories and has given the movie the polish and scale it merits. He plays with intimacy and cinematic sweep, going in close when Ally and Jack are together so that the world falls away — a scene of them in a parking lot shows how conversation turns to courtship — only to then pull back so we can see the enormity of the world the lovers inhabit once Jack takes Ally on tour. And while the crowd seems little more than a surging blur the first time Jack plays, when Ally looks at the throng, she sees it and so do we.

[ Seen “A Star Is Born”? Read Kyle Buchanan’s take , with spoilers ]

The concert scenes of Jack and Ally performing are revved up but personal. (The production borrowed crowds from actual music festivals like Coachella, and their sheer size conveys the scope of Jack’s stardom.) Mr. Cooper sings pleasantly enough and throttles an electric guitar with persuasive fervor. He’s backed by the group Lukas Nelson & the Promise of the Real (Lukas’s dad is Willie Nelson). The music mixes standards with new songs, some written by Mr. Cooper, Lukas Nelson and Lady Gaga, whose supple, often electric singing can, at full throttle, express intensities of feeling far better than the dialogue.

Like many filmmakers, Mr. Cooper sometimes explains too much. It isn’t enough that Jack drinks; Mr. Cooper wants us to know why. So, he fleshes out Jack’s past, turning melodrama into therapy and robbing the character of mystery. One of the weakest scenes, a violent confrontation between Jack and his much-older brother, Bobby (Sam Elliott, whose deep drawl Mr. Cooper has borrowed), is an information dump. In one of the finest, Bobby just wordlessly drives away from Jack, and Mr. Elliott lets you see the ferocity of the brothers’ love — and their pain — in eyes that have begun to water and in a stone face that will shatter.

Mr. Cooper spends more time on the story’s male lead than previous iterations have, perhaps because he’s taken the role himself. The focus on Jack — he scrapes bottom, goes into recovery — somewhat weighs down the remainder of the movie, partly because too much of it is overly familiar. At times, Mr. Cooper seems to share Jack’s unease with Ally’s stardom, particularly after she connects with a manager (Rafi Gavron, oozing sleaze) and transforms from a soulful crooner into a writhing automaton with soulless beats and backup singers. Ally puts on the mask that Mr. Cooper has removed from Lady Gaga, suggesting that — unlike Jack’s — her art is less than pure.

Male self-aggrandizement is baked into the story’s foundation but not ruinously. Jack doesn’t just help turn Ally into a star, giving her the big break she needs. His trauma — she’s insecure, but he’s damaged — becomes a deep well that she draws from, allowing her to become a greater artist. In part, the story is as creaky as that of Pygmalion, the male sculptor who turns a beloved carving into a woman. Yet one of the pleasures of “A Star Is Born” in all its renditions is that it is also about a woman whose ambitions are equal to those of any man and who steadily rises as she weeps and sings toward fabulous self and sovereignty.

A Star Is Born Rated R for alcohol and drug abuse, and some physical violence. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

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There’s a scene early into Bradley Cooper ’s crowd-pleasing “A Star is Born” that distills what it’s really about and why it will hook viewers till the last frame. Cooper’s Jackson Maine, an alt-country singer with a bit more heavy guitar, is getting drunk in a drag club after a show when he meets Lady Gaga ’s Ally. Having worked at the club before, and now waitressing elsewhere, she’s come back to sing a song, a jaw-dropping version of “ La Vie en Rose .” She sashays her way down the bar and ends up locking eyes with Maine as her vocals continue to rise. He is blown away by her talent, but there’s something deeper in that eye contact. Something ineffable. Not long after, while Ally is getting ready to leave with Maine to get another drink, he plays a heartfelt song of his own for the club owner, and she comes out as he’s wrapping up, making eye contact as his vocals find emotional depth. These are two people who fall in love with each other’s talent as much as anything else, inspired by one another in a way that artists often are. This story has been told several times before—and influenced other similar romances—but Cooper and Gaga find a way to make this feel fresh and new. It’s in their eyes.

Before that first night is over, Jackson has realized the depth of Ally’s talent, even hearing her sing part of a song she wrote that will soon become a massive hit for the two of them. These early scenes of “A Star is Born,” especially the first in which Ally sings in front of a Maine audience, are magical. There’s an unforced chemistry between Cooper and Lady Gaga that makes these characters easy to root for, and I’ll admit to a natural affinity for stories of true talent finally coming out of the shadows. The real Gaga knows a thing or two about how one rises from waitress to superstar, and she nails the blend of apprehension and confidence that this kind of thing takes. Of course, Ally is nervous to go on stage or to write songs, but she also senses she’s pretty damn good at it. She’s no mere wallflower watered by a confident man. She’s a force of nature who Jackson gives the encouragement to do her thing.

Of course, the arc of all versions of “A Star is Born” is pretty much the same in that it’s about one comet rising while another crashes. The first time we see Jackson, he’s popping pills, and he’s deeply alcoholic. He allows his demons even more space as he watches his partner achieve massive fame with a form of pop that he finds shallow. Cooper does some of the best work of his career as the kind of man who’s always restless. A friend played by Dave Chappelle tries to offer the advice that every man needs to eventually settle down and stay in a port instead of pulling anchor and moving on again, but Jackson can’t stay still. He's one of those addicts who uses any excuse to fuck things up. He is as self-sabotaging as he is talented, but Cooper avoids just enough of the clichés of the "alcoholism movie" to keep him real. It’s an excellent performance, one that balances Gaga’s in fascinating ways. As she becomes more of a pop legend and he maintains his whiskey-drinking aesthetic, it’s easy to see them pulling apart but the performers keep us believing that these people care about and even need each other. Sometimes the same need that builds us up can eventually destroy us.

“A Star is Born” loses its way slightly in the second half as Ally becomes a household name. Some of the pop fame material doesn’t work, especially a misjudged “SNL” musical performance, as it seems to almost treat what Ally (and even Gaga herself in the real world) do a bit too superficially. The movie seems to agree too easily with Jackson’s belief that pop is disposable. It isn’t always. And the triangle that forms between Ally, Jackson, and Ally’s manager is the most clichéd and least effective aspect of the film. Luckily, Cooper the director regains his footing in the end, bringing his debut film in for the emotional conclusion that even those who haven’t seen the originals will be able to predict is coming, but be moved by nonetheless.

Cynics may be tempted to rip apart “A Star is Born” but there’s just too much that’s been done right here for them to sound legit. (A friend joked, “It’s a musical even angry people can like.”) It's about the people. As is so often the case with actors-turned-directors, Cooper knows how to direct his cast, getting great work from Gaga, Sam Elliott , Andrew Dice Clay , and more. And the film is anchored by its heart-baring music—Cooper wisely allows Gaga to sing complete songs more than once, while also holding his own as a singer himself. A lot of ticket buyers go to the movies for the characters, people they can feel like they know and maybe even care about, and “A Star is Born” delivers two of the most memorable of the year. It’s a film that believes in the power of a song to connect with its listener in a way that can change their lives. And it will be a beloved piece of work for those who believe in it too.

This review was originally filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2018.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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A Star Is Born review – Lady Gaga mesmerises in Streisand's shoes

Bradley Cooper directs and co-stars in this outrageously watchable update of the love story doomed by shifting fame

I t’s the romantic epic of male sacrificial woundedness and it’s been regenerating like Doctor Who. We had it in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson , in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason and originally way back in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March . It’s even been regenerating obliquely in movies such as The Artist and La La Land . Now Bradley Cooper plays the boozy and downwardly mobile alpha-star laying his pride on the showbiz altar of the woman he loves. Cooper directs and co-stars in this outrageously watchable and colossally enjoyable new version, supercharged with dilithium crystals of pure melodrama. He appears opposite a sensationally good Lady Gaga , whose ability to be part ordinary person, part extraterrestrial celebrity empress functions at the highest level at all times.

Here is the heart-wrenching gallantry of the grumpy, drunken singing star teetering over the apex of his fame, who discovers a talented young woman – single-handedly launching her on a glorious career while his own spirals downwards, redeeming his own former arrogance with this magnificently selfless act. He must accept the fate of being the embarrassing loser and has-been, finally not even allowed to be the wind beneath her wings.

Cooper and veteran screenwriter Eric Roth are clearly inspired most directly by the Streisand/Kristofferson film. But in those closeups that Cooper awards himself, and his huge moments of emotional agony … well, he’s channelling a bit of Judy. He certainly de-machos the role, and creates a backstory of vulnerability. Yet the crunch question is: how are Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper going to reinvent that terrifying award-ceremony scene, when he embarrasses her publicly? Well, the climax of their ordeal is bigger than I ever thought possible. It’s the final station of the cross.

Cooper takes his voice down a couple of octaves to play Jackson Maine, a gravel-toned MOR country-rocker doing stadium tours and keeping it together with huge amounts of booze and pills. He’s still a big success, but personally and emotionally he’s running on empty. (Cooper actually co-writes a few of his songs here, and his band is played by Neil Young’s longtime backing group: Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real.) He’s also suffering from encroaching deafness and tinnitus, which periodically bring him close to anxiety attacks and temper tantrums. He has to be shepherded by his manager and older brother, Bobby, played by Sam Elliott , for whom he has longstanding feelings of resentment, rivalry and guilt.

Out of booze after a show one night, Jackson has his driver pull over when he spots what turns out to be a drag bar, where the boss lets a woman sing in non-drag: this is the extraordinarily talented Ally (Lady Gaga), who socks over a killer version of La Vie En Rose. Jackson is stunned, as well he might be. They have an adventure together and Ally’s unimpressed attitude to celebrity and her vocational attitude to music entrances Jackson. He falls deeply in love, even showing up at the family home, where she mortifyingly still lives with her dad, played by Andrew Dice Clay. Jackson finally gets her up on stage with him for a duet, and her greatness is obvious, but a dark shadow falls when she is approached by creepy Brit talent manager Rez (Rafi Gavron), under whose tutelage Ally seriously blows up. She is writer, singer, dancer and sex bomb. Poor Jackson is fame 1.0 and he realises Ally is fame 2.0, and the crunch comes when he is humiliatingly bumped from a promised opening slot at the Grammys, singing a tribute cover to Roy Orbison – of all the tellingly obsolete bygone stars. Ally, meanwhile, is up for three awards that very same evening.

Cooper is arguably prettier than Lady Gaga, but she is the one who commands your attention: that sharp, quizzical, leonine, mesmeric face – an uningratiating face, very different from the wide-eyed openness of Streisand or Garland. (Weirdly, she rather more resembles Marta Heflin, playing the groupie-slash-interviewer who went to bed with Kristofferson in ’76.) Her songs are gorgeous and the ingenuous openness of her scenes with Jackson are wonderfully sympathetic. Meanwhile Cooper, whose screen persona can so often be bland and unchallenging, makes precisely this conservative tendency work for him in the role. He is so sad you want to hug him. Arguably, this film fudges some of Jackson’s dark side, by giving him partial deafness as well as alcoholism, but it is still a richly sympathetic spectacle.

For all that it’s hokum, this film alludes tactlessly to something pretty real. It could be called: A Star Is Dying. The new generation supplants the existing one. For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

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‘A Star Is Born’ Review: Cooper, Lady Gaga Hit All the Right Notes

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One star soars; the other crashes and burns. It’s a tale as old as time, flattened and fatigued by constant repetition. So why in hell did Bradley Cooper choose to make his debut as director with the third remake of A Star Is Born ? What could he bring to the role of the self-destructive headliner living in the shadow of the protégée he loves? And why did he have Lady Gaga , going out on a limb in her first starring role, to follow in the footsteps of the legends who previously aced the role of the newbie: Barbra Streisand (1976), Judy Garland (1954) and Janet Gaynor (1937)? Talk about walking a tightrope without a net.

The movie starts and you think, “Oh no, not again.” And then, boom: Cooper sneaks up and snaps you to attention. Though there’s no disguising the film’s dated origins, the actor-turned-
director’s defiantly fresh approach allows A Star Is Born to emerge as a skyrocket of soul-stirring music, drama and heartbreak. By dumping the usual Hollywood bullshit for something that feels raw, scrappy and lived-in, Cooper and Gaga knock it out of the park. Seamlessly integrating terrific original songs with a script he wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, Cooper refashions his Star for a right-now generation tired of watching blunt truth give way to softball fantasy. The Oscar race has now officially begun.

His character, Jackson Maine, is a washed-up country rocker with a love of booze and lines of blow. The musician’s depressive state has its roots in a turbulent childhood reflected in his contentious relationship with his older brother Bobby (Sam Elliott), who resents Jackson for co-opting his voice. And Dave Chappelle scores as Noodles, a friend who worries that not even love can save the hard-livin’ musician’s soul. Cooper’s performance is enhanced by his surprisingly credible singing. There are times when Jackson’s lyrics still get through to him, as in, “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.”

Or maybe it’s time for him to find his purpose in helping Ally, a waitress who’s getting nowhere as a singer-songwriter. The role is usually played as an ingénue looking for guidance in a world of male predators. Lucky for us — and the movie — Gaga doesn’t do ingénue. Her would-be star from a boisterous Italian family (Andrew Dice Clay barrels through the role of her rowdy Sinatra-crooner dad) has been kicked around by an industry that likes her sound but not her look. She’s a street fighter who knows she’s good. Still, Ally balks when this famous singer drags her onstage.

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Of course, the crowd goes wild. Gaga is a lightning bolt of emotions — and one hell of an actress. Born Stefani Germanotta, Gaga constructed herself as a one-woman visual extravaganza (remember that meat dress?). But not in this movie. To play Ally, she strips herself of all artifice. There’s nothing to hide behind. And while Jackson shrinks from the spotlight, she inhales it like oxygen. The script hints at a sharp notion, that Ally might lose herself in the same way her dad did. Her new manager, Rez (Rafi Gavron), wants Ally to add dancers and glitz to her act. Can she resist?

Cooper elevates a shopworn genre by fully integrating story and song. And the film gains welcome authenticity by recording the songs live, solos and duets, at various music fests, including Coachella and Glastonbury. Jackson and Ally are singer-composers who write what they live. Early on, they sit outside a supermarket at night, crafting an anthem about the euphoria and terror of what’s ahead. It’s called “Shallow” — and it’s easily the best movie song in years.

The director’s gut-level commitment to the material comes through, even when the film tips dangerously into shallow sentiment. It helps immeasurably that the songs Cooper and Gaga wrote in tandem with other musicians, including Mark Ronson, Jason Isbell and Lukas Nelson 
(Willie’s talented son), give a real-deal urgency to this tragic love story. You get pulled into a force field, thanks to Cooper’s behind-the-camera chops and Gaga’s sound and fury. By the time the end credits roll, you realize that, in fact, two stars have been born.

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A Star Is Born

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Watch A Star Is Born with a subscription on Max, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

With appealing leads, deft direction, and an affecting love story, A Star Is Born is a remake done right -- and a reminder that some stories can be just as effective in the retelling.

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Film Review: ‘A Star Is Born’

Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga are stunning together in Cooper's rapturous rock 'n' roll remake of a romantic saga that never gets old.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ A Star Is Born ” is that thing we always yearn for but so rarely get to see: a transcendent Hollywood movie. It’s the fourth remake of a story that dates back to 1932, but this one has a look and vibe all its own — rapturous and swooning, but also delicate and intimate and luminous. It’s set in the present day, but in spirit it’s a sophisticated retro ’70s drama built around the uncanny flow of feeling that develops between the movie’s two stars: Bradley Cooper , who plays Jackson Maine, a hard-drinking, bad-ol’-boy redneck rock ‘n’ roller who is still hanging on as a popular attraction but has lost the lust for what he’s doing, and Lady Gaga , in her fetching and accomplished movie-star debut, as Ally, an ingenuous, fresh-faced singer-songwriter who becomes his lover and stage partner before rocketing on her own into the new pop stratosphere.

She takes off as he slowly crashes — that’s the soapy tragic “Star Is Born” concept. But what the movie does is to take this fabled melodramatic romantic seesaw and turn it into something indelibly heartfelt and revealing. Cooper directed the movie himself, working from a script he co-wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, and to say that he does a good job would be to understate his accomplishment. As a filmmaker, Bradley Cooper gets right onto the high wire, staging scenes that take their time and play out with a shaggy intimacy that’s shorn of the usual “beats.” The new “Star Is Born” is a total emotional knockout, but it’s also a movie that gets you to believe, at every step, in the complicated rapture of the story it’s telling.

The 1976 version, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, had some terrific cornball love songs, but they didn’t belong anywhere near the stadium-rock stage, and neither did Streisand, which is part of why the movie came off as borderline ludicrous. It seemed stranded, with a kind of campy sincere ineptitude, between three worlds: Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, and Barbra Streisand rock-princess fantasy.

But from the electrifying opening moments of the new version, in which Jackson, boozy and raw, with his sunburned squint and hard-bitten shit-kicker sexiness, takes the stage of a gigantic stadium and launches into a grinding slow rocker that sounds like “Victim of Love”-era Eagles as done by the Allman Brothers, the movie is thrillingly authentic. That’s no minor accomplishment. Hollywood almost never succeeds in nailing the rock world, but “A Star Is Born,” though a love story through and through, is the most lived-in rock ‘n’ roll movie since “Almost Famous.” And that absolute looks right , sounds right , feels right verisimilitude sets the stage for everything that follows.

Jackson, who looks to be in his mid-40s, has been around long enough that he now occupies a grey zone between legend and nostalgia. He can still fill an arena full of screaming fans, and his old hits have become classic-rock chestnuts, but his sound and persona have long slipped out of the zeitgeist. His whole outlaw look — the beard and rancher’s hat, the Kristofferson-meets-Skynyrd soused macho twinkle — mark him as a charismatic relic, and the grand irony is this: What that look, and sound, are all about is an era when rock ‘n’ roll strutted its “authenticity,” but now that he’s out of date, Jackson’s authenticity looks more than ever like a showbiz conceit, frozen in amber. It’s a part he’s playing, an image he’s working — and secretly struggling — to keep alive. He’s got a signature ballad that goes “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die,” and when he wrote it (long ago), he probably didn’t know that he was talking about himself.

In the first of many telling jump cuts, the film leaps from his on-stage glory to Jackson slinking into the back of his car, weary and alone, grabbing the bottle of gin he’s got stashed there. He takes a guzzle, and Cooper, acting with his body, lets you feel just how much Jackson (between sickly coughs) needs the lifeblood of that drink. It’s what he believes in more than the show he’s just finished.

How do you play a drunk? We know, of course, that the answer is not to “play drunk,” but Cooper doesn’t just avoid the usual slurry shambling (though at key moments he does a little of that too, and it’s powerful). He brings off something I’ve rarely seen done this exquisitely: He plays blitzed, very functional and in his element, his smile and reflexes greased by the liquor. Jackson speaks in a deep, low, deliberate Southern-stud growl — a voice with real music in it, though one that lets you taste all the booze it’s marinated in.

Needing another drink, he has his driver drop him off at the first available bar, which turns out to be a roadside dive on drag-queen karaoke night. It’s not his scene, but he doesn’t mind. He’s the same celebrity everywhere he goes, so he’s in the perfect mood of lit-up contentment when she walks on stage.

She is Ally, the one non-drag performer of the night (she’s friends with all the queens there, so they let her sing for real). When she enters the room, the movie pulls off a neat trick. We’ve already seen Ally break up with her boyfriend over the phone, letting out a banshee wail in the process, and when she appears in heavy white-make up and pasted on half-circle eyebrows, her hair teased into a punked-out French pastry, then does a strutting-down-the-bar version of “La Vie en Rose” that she milks for every flourish of theatrical kitsch she can, we think, “Of course! How Gaga-netic!” Backstage after the show, Jackson gently pulls off one of Ally’s eyebrows and asks her out for a drink.

But when she emerges from the dressing room minus all the Gaga trappings, we’re shocked to see a young woman with softly falling straight brown hair and the sweetest of chiclet-tooth grins, and this is the movie’s way of saying: Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lady Gaga, actress. A character we haven’t seen before.

Ally, make no mistake, has sass to spare (later that evening, when Jackson is confronted by a troublemaker at his favorite cop bar, she gives him a punch), but Gaga, in an ebullient and winningly direct performance, never lets her own star quality get in the way of the character. Or, rather, she lets us see that star quality is something that lives inside Ally but is still waiting to come out (the way it was in the young Streisand of “Funny Girl”). Ally works as a waitress and lives with her dad, the Sinatra-fixated passive-aggressive Teddy bear Lorenzo (Andrew Dice Clay) in a modest suburban neighborhood, and she and Jackson strike an unforced connection. He can let down his guard around her, and his wistful melancholy starts to seep out.

Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet. Ally has something that Jackson recognizes because he used to have it too: the songwriter’s passion, the drive to take your own story and turn it into a jukebox poem. They have a great conversation about her Roman nose — which plays, knowingly, off the prejudices of the music industry that Gaga confronted on her way up. Ally thinks her nose is too big (or so she’s been told), but Jackson thinks it’s beautiful — and, of course, he’s right.

He listens to a song she wrote, and can tell that she’s got the gift, so after wooing her to one of his concerts, he suddenly brings her onstage to sing that song with him. It’s called “Shallow,” and when their voices melt together on the line “We’re far from the shallow now,” we melt along with them, and when Ally suddenly sends the song into a higher register, you will feel tingles rippling through your body. It’s an absolutely ecstatic moment, because it’s about the fusion of these two voices and souls, about Jackson coming back to life, about Ally realizing her destiny, and about the audience’s rediscovery of what romance in a movie can still be: a volt to the heart.

Does Jackson want Ally to become a star? Sort of. He’s the one who makes it possible, but after a video of their live duet goes viral, she’s approached after a show by a rock manager, Dez (Rafi Gavron), who gives her the I-can-make-you-a-star rap. Immediately, we know where this is going: to a place Jackson is not going to like. The manager represents the dissolution of Jackson’s sway over Ally, something the movie views in contemporary feminist terms. In his dissolute-rocker way, Jackson is grounded in the old male establishment, a place where Ally can be a “girl singer.” What he doesn’t realize is that she’s going to embrace stardom on her own terms, and they aren’t his.

Rafi Gavron’s terrific performance as Rez, the tough-love manager, is a great example of what’s so compelling about the new “Star Is Born.” We’ve seen this character — slick, British, corporate — before, and he’s always played as an insidious pest who symbolizes the big sellout. But that’s not the way Gavron plays him. He makes Rez a smart and compelling straight shooter, and the movie never caricatures him as a sleaze.

Instead, it flips our expectations. Ally gets plugged into the 21st-century pop machine — high-dazzle robotic choreography, a new glam look with flaming red hair, the whole media swirl, complete with meticulously timed rollout performance on “Saturday Night Live” — and we realize that the film is playing off Lady Gaga’s own rise. The fascination of this is that instead of satirizing Ally’s journey as some sort of plunge into synthetic marketing decadence, the movie says, in essence: This is the new landscape, same as the old landscape . Next to Jackson’s world, it looks “inauthentic” (and viewers of a certain age may automatically view it that way), but Jackson’s world probably looked inauthentic to the generation before it. The movie says that in pop (as in life), it’s always time for the old ways to die, and for the new ways to be born.

That’s what Jackson can’t handle, and it’s why he drinks. Cooper has a couple of scenes in which Jackson gets sloppy and nasty: he “affectionately” smears Ally’s face with cake, and when she’s taking a bath, and he’s really sozzled, he starts to rag on her and even drops the U-word (“ugly”), which shocks us. But it’s part of the power of “A Star Is Born” that their relationship is never one-note; it’s tender, sexy, angry, jealous, and sad, all at the same time. It’s a real love, and could have stayed that way except that Jackson is too broken. The movie lets us touch his damage, body and soul: the hearing loss accompanied by tinnitus (which we hear on the soundtrack), the sense that going through the motions of stardom for too long has ground him to a weary nub. Sam Elliott, with white hair, his mopey bluntness sharper than ever, plays Jackson’s older brother, Bobby, who has been his road manager for years (but has had it with cleaning up after Jackson’s messes), and the two actors give their fights, and embraces, a deeply rooted sense of the past. They got a raw deal growing up with a drunken father, and they’re still playing it out.

The best version of “A Star Is Born” has always been the 1954 George Cukor version: moody, purplish, extravagant, driven by Judy Garland’s self-dramatizing fever. The scene you remember best from it, apart from Garland singing “The Man That Got Away,” is James Mason’s demented drunken slap of Garland during the Academy Awards — one of the most outrageous moments in movie history. In the new “Star Is Born,” Bradley Cooper pays homage to that moment, in a scene set at the Grammys, and actually tops it in outrageousness, in sick-joke masochistic power. And he does it convincingly. That’s part of the magnetic pull of this version — it, too, is a romance heightened by the cruel mirror of showbiz. Yet it has a naked humanity that leaves you wowed. These two people, the rising star and the fading star, are locked in a love as true as it is torn, and by the end of the movie they’ve both become us. “A Star Is Born” is a reminder of the scrappy grand passion that movies are all about.

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Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition), Aug. 31, 2018. Running time: 135 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release, in association with Live Nation Productions, in association with MGM Pictures, of a Jon Peters/Bill Gerber/Joint Effort Production prod. Producers: Bill Gerber, Jon Peters, Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips, Lynette Howell Taylor. Executive producers: Ravi Mehta, Basil Iwanyk, Niija Kuykendall, Sue Kroll, Michael Rapino, Heather Parry.
• Crew: Director: Bradley Cooper. Screenplay: Eric Roth, Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters. Camera (color, widescreen): Matthew Libatique. Editor: Jay Cassidy. Music: Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, Lukas Nelson, Jason Isbell, Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter, Diane Warren.
• With: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Andrew Dice Clay, Rafi Gavron, Dave Chappelle, Rebecca Field, Michael Harney, Shangela Laquifa Wadley, William Belli, Anthony Ramos.

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• Lady Gaga Delivers a Knockout Performance in <i>A Star Is Born</i>

Lady Gaga Delivers a Knockout Performance in A Star Is Born

T here’s only one antidote for the weird world we live in, an age of political anxiety, Instagram envy, humorless personal essays that treat basic life experiences like major tragedies, and selfies: We need more melodramas, movies that show human beings making all sorts of wrong choices, falling in love with people from whom they should run a mile, and in the end recovering lost bits of themselves, all while looking fabulous. Exaggeration is key—a tasteful, sensible melodrama is no melodrama at all—and you need a star who can radiate the nobility of suffering with Kabuki-level grandeur. Someone like Lady Gaga .

Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is just on the right side of tasteful, which is to say it’s slightly on the wrong side: It could stand to be more nutso in its expression of grand human emotions and dismal human failures. But it works anyway: You come away feeling something for these people, flawed individuals who are trying to hold their cracked pieces of self together—or to mend the cracks of those they love. Cooper plays charming but sozzled country star Jackson Maine, a guy who gets through each show—and every day—losing himself in booze. He’s losing his hearing, too, though he’s of course in denial about that, no matter how much his brother and ersatz caretaker, Bobby (Sam Elliott), tries to talk sense into him.

Enter Lady Gaga—the superstar who was born Stefani Germanotta, though the movie doesn’t credit her as such—as Ally, a restaurant worker who also sings and writes songs. After lurching through one of his own shows, Jackson sees her performing in a drag bar—the queens all love her, so they’re happy to have her onstage. In her tiny slip dress, with hyper theatrical eyebrows, like slender black parentheses, stuck over her own, she’s like an alien from Planet Song, shimmering her way through “La Vie en Rose.” If you’re looking for comparisons to Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland or Barbara Streisand, the other Star Is Born stars (this is the third or fourth remake, depending on whether or not you count George Cukor’s 1932 What Price Hollywood? ), Gaga isn’t much like any of them: She’s more like Liza Minnelli, who channeled some of her mother’s fragility but tempered it with pluckiness. When Gaga’s Ally sings, she’s less a creature from over the rainbow than a sprite from another world who has quickly learned the ropes of our own fire and earth.

MORE: What to Know About the Original A Star Is Born —and the Other Versions, Too

No wonder Jackson falls for her. Her persuades her to have a late-night, post-show drink with him, and she gets into a fist fight defending him from a boor waving a phone camera in his face: This is the beginning of a pattern, that of the woman trying to save the man, but her boldness is striking. Jackson drives her to a convenience store and applies a bag of frozen veggies to her hand; he’s the caretaker for now. Then, as they sit in the nighttime parking lot, he removes her rings, lest they get stuck, by closing his lips gently around her swelling fingers. She returns the favor by singing, at his request, a scrap of a song she’s written. It’s a lovely scene, a brush-stroke vignette of two people finding enchantment in one another.

If you’ve seen any of the previous Star Is Born iterations—the 1937 with Gaynor and Frederic March, the 1954 with Garland and James Mason, or the 1976 with Streisand and Kris Kristofferson—you know just how wrong this story can go. And if you’re new to this particular formula, welcome. Cooper’s version proves there’s always a way to freshen up old material. The finest scenes are the early ones, in which Jackson, with true generosity, gives Ally’s career a boost, first by inviting her onstage for a song, and then turning her into a true partner.

The big question that’s been hovering in the air for months is, Can Lady Gaga act? It’s a ridiculous question. Singers often make fabulous actors. They’re primed for it: All singing is acting. But what’s surprising about Gaga is how charismatic she is without her usual extreme stage makeup, outlandish wigs and inventive costumes. It’s such a pleasure to look at her face, unadorned, with that extraordinary, face-defining nose—it’s like discovering a new country. Later in the story, as Ally’s career takes off while Jackson’s fizzles, Gaga is less entrancing though no less likable: Ally connects with a manager who reshapes her image (Rafi Gavron), turning her from a fresh-faced singer-songwriter to a pop siren with hyper-red hair and increasingly theatrical clothes. This is where the movie loses a few puffs of steam. It’s hard not to miss Ally’s unadorned face and unflashy brown hair: You might find yourself wanting more Germanotta and less Gaga, Even so, Ally the superstar is still nowhere near as mythically outsized as Gaga herself is. In fact, as pop creations go, she’s rather average, though she certainly knows her way around a power ballad.

And she’s still the star of this whole show. As her co-star and director, Cooper shows an artistic generosity that’s almost courtly. The basic Star is Born story is geared so you pity the man almost more than you admire the woman. In every version, the man threatens to steal the show with his own degradation; the woman’s protective fortitude is far less interesting. But as an actor, Cooper fades into the corner at just the right moments, allowing Gaga to shine. He recognizes that as a performer, she’s larger than life; he’s just about life-sized, and there’s no shame in that. He also creates a suitable showcase for small but terrific performances from the likes of Dave Chappelle (as one of Jackson’s more sensible friends from the music world) and Andrew Dice Clay (as Ally’s limo-driving dad, Lorenzo).

Cooper makes some smart plot choices, too. (The screenplay is by Eric Roth, Cooper and Will Fetters.) Jackson’s demise is sensitively handled—nothing like Kris Kristofferson crashing his car just so Streisand can rush to the scene and cradle his lifeless head with sorrowful gusto. (Who thought that was a good idea?) And he keeps the filmmaking straightforward and unvarnished. It’s wonderful to see a first-time filmmaker who’s more interested in effective storytelling than in impressing us; telling a story effectively is hard enough. Best of all, Cooper has succeeded in making a terrific melodrama for the modern age. This is a story of big personalities and even bigger human mistakes. These days we’re always ready for our own close-ups. What a relief to turn the stage over to someone else for a change.

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Lady Gaga’s ‘A Star Is Born’ Hits All the Right Notes: Movie Review

'A Star is Born,' which opens Oct. 5, is a thrilling, and, ultimately, heartbreaking tale of music's power to heal and the music business's equally corrosive ability to destroy all but the strongest…

By Melinda Newman

Melinda Newman

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At their core, the four versions of A Star Is Born — the 1937 original drama and three musical iterations — mine the same territory: An aspiring actress or singer falls under the spell professionally and romantically of an older actor or singer and her career rises meteorically as his precipitously falls.

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However, the contours differ in each film, and in the latest version, Bradley Cooper, who plays world-weary singer-songwriter Jackson Maine, and Lady Gaga, as straight-shooting Ally, give us immensely sympathetic characters, whose considerable musical talents are overshadowed only by their vulnerabilities.

Likely to draw favorable comparisons to the most recent remake — 1976’s version starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson — A Star Is Born 4.0, which opens Oct. 5, is a thrilling and, ultimately, heartbreaking tale of music’s power to heal and the music business’s equally corrosive ability to destroy all but the strongest souls.

Cooper and Lady Gaga’s chemistry is off the charts. It’s a spark lit not only by their physical attraction, but by the crackling creative energy between their characters as songwriters and performers. After a ridiculously entertaining scene when Maine discovers Ally performing Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” in a noisy drag bar, his awe when Ally sings her own song a cappella for him alone in an empty parking lot is the stuff of movie gold.

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Lady gaga teases 'is that all right' from 'a star is born' soundtrack: stream it now.

In a spellbinding performance, Lady Gaga’s Ally, propelled by Maine’s belief in her, goes from beleaguered waitress initially reluctant to join him onstage for a gorgeous duet of the showstopper “Shallow” to then claiming her own spotlight during his headlining festival gig before tens of thousands. To her credit, Lady Gaga is always believable as a developing talent who loves Maine and is not using him to advance her career, but is surely going to grab the brass ring once it comes within reach.

In his confident directorial debut, Cooper is equally revelatory. Doing his own gruff singing and playing, he’s entirely credible as the slightly grizzled, charming booze- and drug-addicted troubadour whose decades of fame haven’t gone so far to his head that he doesn’t still ask his driver how his son is and listen to the answer.

In very short order, Ally goes from a singer-songwriter — complete with an album cover of Carole King’s Tapestry on her bedroom wall — to a glittery, dancing pop puppet, who sings insipid lines like “why’d you come around me with an ass like that” during her Saturday Night Live debut. The movie never makes it clear why Ally, who is otherwise resolute, doesn’t protest more vociferously the dumbing down of her music. Is it because she is so enamored with potential stardom that she is happy to dilute her sound, or is her manager (Rafi Gavron) forcing her to make the switch along with changing her hair color and fashion choices? Regardless, the film makes its not-so-subtle point that female pop artists often find themselves required to play up their sexuality in a way that male artists are seldom asked to exploit.

Unlike Kristofferson’s portrayal, Cooper’s Maine rarely seems resentful of Ally’s rise, as his substance-fueled downward spiral leads to playing soul-sucking corporate gigs and taking a cameo, instead of starring, in a Grammy tribute to Roy Orbison. The one blistering scene where he verbally attacks her both professionally and personally — and he knows exactly what to say to exact the most pain — seems more driven by real concern that she’s squandering her talent than bitterness over her success. To her credit, as her devastation from his lacerating words plays across her face, Ally gives as good as she gets. As compassionate as she is throughout the film — even when he publicly humiliates her for the last time — playing savior is not on her résumé.

Lady Gaga Dazzles at 'A Star Is Born' Los Angeles Premiere: See the Photos

Similarly differing from past versions, both Maine and Ally have their own support systems beyond the usual sycophants. Ally’s dad, played with a goofy sweetness by Andrew Dice Clay, and her best friend Ramon (Anthony Ramos) genuinely care about her well-being. For Maine, childhood friend Noodles (Dave Chappelle, in a short but pivotal scene) and older brother Bobby Maine (the always good Sam Elliott) provide solid, necessary grounding, even when the sibling rivalry and past childhood trauma between Jackson and Bobby momentarily tears them apart.

None of this would matter if the concert scenes weren’t so strong. A Star Is Born is bursting with musical goodness, chock-full of new songs written by Lady Gaga and Cooper, as well as a Murderer’s Row of contributors, including Jason Isbell, Mark Ronson, Lukas Nelson (whose group Promise of the Real serves as Maine’s backing band), Hillary Lindsey, Lori McKenna and Natalie Hemby. The ringing authenticity to their performances, filmed at Stagecoach, Coachella and Glastonbury, no doubt also comes from Lady Gaga’s insistence that she and Cooper sing live. Ally’s final stage triumph — shot at LA’s Shrine Auditorium, where Judy Garland also filmed a scene in the 1954 version — is as resonant as when Whitney Houston belted out “I Will Always Love You” at the conclusion of The Bodyguard, with an equally stunning ballad, “I’ll Never Love Again.”

If the end, which stays true to past versions, seems a little too pat, it certainly proves that the show must go on.

Though Oscar season is just beginning, it’s hard to imagine A Star Is Born not taking home some serious hardware, with possible nods for for best picture, director, actor, actress, cinematography and, of course, best original song.

(Interscope will release the A Star Is Born soundtrack on Oct. 5, the movie’s opening date.)

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• Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper shine in the newest version of A Star Is Born

The music business is the backdrop for a moving love story.

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Share All sharing options for: Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper shine in the newest version of A Star Is Born

The concept behind A Star Is Born is the stuff of scientific mythology: For one star to be born, another must flame out. The world has a ceiling on its potential star count.

Whether or not that’s true, Hollywood — located, after all, in the City of Stars — finds the metaphor alluring. The latest version of A Star Is Born , directed by and starring Bradley Cooper alongside Stefani Germanotta (a.k.a. Lady Gaga), is now the fourth movie to bear both the title and a plot arc about one star rising while another dims .

The first one came out in 1937, focusing on an aspiring starlet (played by Janet Gaynor) and an established actor (Fredric March) whose alcoholism is causing his own career to plummet. The film was remade in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, and then again in 1976, this time set in the world of music and starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.

Differing cinematic sensibilities due to the era aside, the concept remains the same: A man who’s seen it all in show business and who’s been driven to addiction by its hollowness encounters a talented, refreshingly authentic woman (younger, to varying degrees) and falls in love with her almost on sight, then introduces her to the business he’s already conquered.

They marry just as the industry is beginning to take note of her. Though they mutually support one another, his love for her can’t overcome his own depression. The celebrity on which he’s coasted won’t save him forever. And meanwhile, he’s dragging down the woman he loves.

Some people have said that every generation makes its own A Star Is Born (though I’m personally glad we skipped whatever “sell-out” fable the ’90s would have served up). And this one contains homages aplenty to the earlier films, particularly the 1976 version. By now, you can’t just watch A Star Is Born ; any new iteration of the story begs to be seen through the lens of not just its predecessors, but also the world into which its particular star will be born.

Bradley Cooper — for whom the 2018 film, his directorial debut, is a passion project in every sense — seems to understand that intuitively. His Star Is Born follows the same contours as earlier versions, but feels anchored in 2018, particularly because the extra-cinematic work of his leading lady — unapologetic pop provocateur Lady Gaga — lends extra meaning to the film.

And it’s also the first of its breed to focus predominately on the love story between the rising and falling stars, equal partners in the relationship who nonetheless find their deep connection altered and shaped by the ways that success in creative work can keep shifting the landscape under two lovers’ feet. The movie works best, above all, as a melodrama about the limits and possibilities of love, and how love can make us into the best and worst versions of ourselves in the very same moment.

Laced with instantly memorable songs and — clichés be damned — stellar performances, 2018’s A Star Is Born is the kind of movie that tries to harness all of its cinematic possibility to make your heart burst. And it more or less succeeds.

A Star Is Born puts a present-day spin on a familiar story

Like its predecessors, A Star Is Born introduces both its stars in media res. The star on the decline — his alcoholism and addiction have long since exceeded the “high functioning” stage — is Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper), the character called “Norman” Maine in earlier versions. Here he’s a blues-rock megastar, a wounded man with a soft heart whom Cooper plays with credibly bruised gruffness.

Following a gig that he drunkenly pulls off just fine — we’re meant to know this is a nightly occurrence — he asks his driver to stop at a random bar, which turns out to be hosting its weekly drag night. He sticks around.

And, as luck (or fate) would have it, Ally (Gaga) is performing. A waitress at a much fancier joint by day, she’s a singer by night, and because she used to work at the bar, its proprietors let her have an act in the drag show. She sings La Vie en Rose and brings the house down. In the time it takes to sing that one well-worn song, she wins Jack’s artistic respect and, it is clear, his heart.

From there, the story is familiar, though with some 2018 twists. Ally writes her own music, but doesn’t usually sing it in public; Jack convinces her she ought to, and then drags her out onstage to do so. (The song they perform, “Shallow,” which Ally is meant to have written, is almost certainly a shoo-in for Best Original Song at the 2019 Oscars.) They work in different genres — his sound is blues-rock with a hint of country; hers is pop — but they complement one another perfectly.

Jack warns Ally not to lose her authenticity; she has something to say, he tells her, and she should use the platform she’s given in order to say it. (That perspective could cast the movie as anti-pop, until you consider who’s playing Ally.) Meanwhile, he’s not old, but his soul, his music, and his act are, and the film not-so-subtly suggests that what he represents — and the lifestyle that goes with it — may need to step aside and make room for others. (“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die,” one of Jack’s most frequently performed songs begins.)

This is Ally’s story as much as Jack’s — she’s the star in the title, after all. He lights the spark beneath her, but she already contains everything needed to burst into flame, including a healthy skepticism about losing control of her own image in an image-based business. Though she suffers a few growing pains in the form of lousy pop songs, she is more than capable of finding her way.

A Star Is Born ’s songs were written and produced by a stable of talented artists all over the genre map: Jason Isbell , Lukas Nelson , Mark Ronson , Diane Warren , Anthony Rossomando , and others, as well as Cooper himself and, of course, Lady Gaga, who brought in a number of her frequent collaborators to write Ally’s songs.

And while it’s not a perfect film — though the first hour just may be — A Star Is Born boasts more than enough passion to make up for some of its narrative hiccups. It swings from intimate drama to concert film and back again with a limpid pace and fluidity. And when it deviates from its predecessors on certain plot points, those choices feel both modern and perfectly natural. It’s hard to imagine watching the film and not being moved.

A Star Is Born is more interested in its love story than in the industry around it

A Star Is Born has only a moderate interest in the actual music business, however — a fact that will doubtless raise the hackles of some viewers positioned closer to the industry. Whereas some of the earlier versions of A Star Is Born have dwelt on how stars are actually created, and what makes them fade, this one is more interested in what happens between the stars themselves.

So this is a musical melodrama, one shot through with heat and light. Cooper, acting his heart out while directing at the same time — it turns out he’s great at both — plays Jack with a low growl, a tribute to the older brother (played by the wonderful Sam Elliott) whom he idolizes.

As Ally, Gaga is luminous, funny, and brilliant. She’s hard to look away from, playing Ally as a fully-developed star in her own right who just needs a couple of nudges to be set aflame. And together, their chemistry is, at times, goosebump-inducing. (Earlier films often emphasized an age gap between the characters, but it’s shrunk over time, and though Ally is certainly a little younger than Jack here, they seem equally matched.)

The electricity of their connection — and the fact that their relationship develops into something that can bear the weight of both hardship and success for so long — is, the movie suggests, due at least as much to their mutual respect for one another’s gifts as creators and performers. It would be wrong to say there’s no hint of jealousy. But where envy creeps in, it never becomes about tearing the other person down; theirs is a loving, passionate, complicated link that lets them both create some of their best work, and become their better selves, too.

Love can’t conquer everything. Scars run deep. But love is what ultimately allows the jealousy to fade. A Star Is Born is undoubtedly a swirling, highly produced, Hollywood-style melodrama, but it has something to say about the world it’s set in, about what it takes to remain a human in the midst of a celebrity-making machine that would rather package people to conform to its own standards. The message the film sends is that it’s not really about “being authentic”; we stay real because other people see us, and they love us for what they see.

A Star Is Born premiered at the Venice Film Festival, made its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, and will open in theaters on October 5.

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A Star Is Born First Reviews: A Fresh Take on An Old-Fashioned Love Song

The first critics to weigh in on bradley cooper's directorial debut are raving about lady gaga, a stellar supporting cast, and cooper's own deft hand behind the camera..

Indeed, a star is born in pop music icon Lady Gaga, while co-lead Bradley Cooper proves to be a natural behind the camera in his directorial debut. Together, they’re a winning team, at least according to critics. While no one is making awards predictions just yet (obvious Best Original Song contenders aside), initial reviews for the latest incarnation of  A Star is Born  (currently Fresh at 90% with 21 reviews counted) are calling the movie a worthy remake after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Check out what the first round of critics are saying:

The big question: How good is Lady Gaga?

Lady Gaga delivers a knockout performance. – Stephanie Zacharek, Time

[It] deserves to be called a breakout performance. – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

She deserves praise for her restrained, human-scale performance. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

Lady Gaga is nothing short of extraordinary. – Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage

[She is] sensationally good. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

How about her co-star ?

Cooper, whose screen persona can so often be bland and unchallenging, makes precisely this conservative tendency work for him in the role. He is so sad you want to hug him. –  Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

It’s testament to Cooper’s performance that he remains throughout a sympathetic and tragic character. –  John Bleasdale, CineVue

How is Cooper as a filmmaker?

The star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director. – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

It’s wonderful to see a first-time filmmaker who’s more interested in effective storytelling than in impressing us. –  Stephanie Zacharek, Time

The opening scenes show him displaying a penchant for Kubrickian one-point-perspective shots, but he’s at his best, as so many directors who came up though acting tend to be, when the camera gets close to his performers and captures their intimate interplay. –  Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

(Photo by Warner Bros.)

How is the chemistry between Gooper and Gaga?

It’s a thrill to watch Gaga and Cooper craft musical magic together. –  Mara Reinstein, US Weekly

Cooper and Lady Gaga are dynamite together. –  Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Cooper and Gaga are such a well-matched screen couple: they have serious yowch-my-fingers chemistry. –  Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

[They’re] a miracle of stage chemistry. –  Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage

There’s real warmth and a sexy spark in [Cooper’s] onscreen chemistry with Gaga. –  David Rooney, Holllywood Reporter

The film itself feels like a kind of duet, and suffers when the two aren’t sharing the screen. –  Michael Nordine, IndieWire

Did we really need another version of  A Star Is Born ?

An unnecessary remake. Cooper and his team simply aren’t able to reinvigorate material that has been pored over so many times before by other filmmakers. – Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

It’s an extraordinary surprise that this new version packs such a wallop…[it’s] for people who never saw a previous version, for people who love any of the previous versions, and even for those who think the property is moth-eaten and old-fashioned. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

The story of A Star Is Born may be as old as show-business, but it is also electrifyingly fresh – a well-known melody given vivid, searching new force. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Cooper’s fresh take finds plenty of mileage left in the well-trod showbiz saga. – David Rooney, Holllywood Reporter

How does it compare to other recent musicals?

[Not] likely to appeal to fans of Gaga’s outré performance-art persona… Enthusiastic performances apart, the songs themselves are unmemorably generic. –  Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Unlike many similar semi-musical films, in which the tracks grind the storytelling to a halt, here the music… does a fair bit of narrative heavy lifting from the beginning… 2019 Best Song winner, for my money: “Always Remember Us This Way.” –  Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

Best Original Song Oscar nods are in the bag. –  Mara Reinstein, US Weekly

This is a musical for lovers and loathers of the genre alike: deluxe studio entertainment like they used to make. –  Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

In an age where Mamma Mia and The Greatest Showman pass as hit musicals, it’s an exciting reminder of what the genre can be. –  Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Are there any supporting standouts?

The movie also has some great unexpected supporting turns, including Dave Chappelle as an old friend of Jackson’s and Andrew Dice Clay as Ally’s Rat Pack-dreamer dad. –  Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

[It’s] a suitable showcase for small but terrific performances from the likes of Dave Chappelle and Andrew Dice Clay. –  Stephanie Zacharek, Time

Sam Elliot, whose bluff, bittersweet performance as Jackson’s manager and (much) older brother ranks among the 74-year-old’s very finest work. –  Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

[Features] standout support from Dave Chappelle, Sam Elliott and Andrew Dice Clay. –  Adam Woodward, Little White Lies

How big is this movie going to be?

It’s going to be a phenomenon. –  Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

A Star Is Born  premiered on Friday at the Venice Film Festival, and it opens in limited release on Friday, October 5. Read all the reviews for it here .

A Star Is Born (2018) 90%

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Review: Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper are electrifying in extraordinary 'A Star Is Born'

With their phenomenal “A Star Is Born,” Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper upend expectations and spectacularly freshen up a stock Hollywood story.

Simultaneously an immersive concert film, enchanting romance and tear-jerking rock fantasy, “A Star Is Born” (★★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters nationwide Friday) is a dynamic multifaceted showcase for Gaga and Cooper, who makes his directing debut a thing of melodic, masterful beauty. Together, they form an electrifying duo in one of the best movies of 2018 and the finest musical since 2002’s “Chicago.”

Cooper isn't the first one to go down the film's familiar road: This is the fourth “A Star Is Born,” which tosses in references and story points from earlier iterations – notably, the 1954 film with Judy Garland and James Mason, as well as the 1976 version starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand. But the way Cooper lays bare the characters' hang-ups, flaws and vices takes the well-trodden melodramatic concept – young starlet on the rise, aging icon heading the other way – and creates something extraordinary.

More: Good luck getting Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper's 'Shallow' out of your head

Related: Gaga serves Elizabethan glamour at 'A Star Is Born' U.K. premiere

Like an edgy, amped-up cross between Roy Orbison and Garth Brooks, countrified roots rocker Jackson Maine (Cooper) lives hard and drinks harder. One night after a sold-out show, he winds up at a local drag bar and falls in love – sonically and otherwise – with Ally (Gaga) as she sings “La Vie en Rose.” A hotel waitress who hates her job, men and the music industry (not necessarily in that order), Ally is secretly a heck of a songwriter but shy about it, though Jack tells her she has "something to say and a way to say it so people listen to it."

He invites Ally to a show, then pulls her on the stage to sing the ultracatchy “Shallow,"  which she wrote partly with Jack in mind. What's a potentially corny sequence is instead a truly exhilarating, goosebump-inducing knockout moment.

The first hour of a “A Star Is Born” is especially satisfying, with Ally becoming a viral hit and each acting as the other's muse. But the downward spiral strikes like a dissonant chord: Jack struggles with alcoholism and hearing loss from tinnitus, while Ally quickly finds A-list fame as a mainstream pop star (she pretty much becomes Lady Gaga), disappointing musical purist Jack and driving a wedge between them.

More: Lady Gaga cries over 'A Star is Born' – and Metallica inspired part of the movie

Preview: 10 movies you must see this fall, from 'Halloween' to 'A Star Is Born'

Soundtrack nerds will love all of it. Gaga and Cooper collaborated with others on the outstanding original numbers, including the down-and-dirty jam “Black Eyes” and weepy ballad “I’ll Never Love Again.”

Just as key as the top-notch songs is a first-rate supporting cast, including Sam Elliott as Jack’s conflicted brother and tour manager, Dave Chappelle as Jack’s oldest confidant and Andrew Dice Clay as Ally’s caring father.

“A Star Is Born,” a no-brainer for a best picture nomination with strong Oscar contenders for best actor and actress, is most noteworthy for its two stars reborn. Stripped down and vulnerable, Gaga proves she’s as much an acting powerhouse as she is a musical standout. Meanwhile, Cooper turns in his best performance ever as a growling, flawed superstar who’s the beating heart of the film. (Plus, while Gaga is obviously a great singer, Cooper’s brawny vocals are a revelation.) 

Perhaps most impressive is Cooper’s splendid directing and storytelling choices. He intriguingly emphasizes the artists' point of view rather than the audience’s in the musical scenes, shows a knack for making everything count (from background visuals to song lyrics) and has something to say about music, love, celebrity and the transporting triumph of making a joyful noise.

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A star is born, common sense media reviewers.

Cooper, Lady Gaga shine in tragic story of love, addiction.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Although parts are more cautionary than inspiring,

Jackson and Ally are both flawed, but they do love

A character punches people a couple of times. One

Frequent kissing. Several sex scenes of varying de

Frequent (more than 100 uses) of strong language,

Brands/products shown include Prius, iPhone, Yamah

A main character abuses and alcohol, drugs. He dri

Parents need to know that A Star Is Born is the fourth big-screen take on a tragic love story centered around the pitfalls of substance abuse and show business. Starring Bradley Cooper (making his directorial debut) as a stadium-filling rock star and Lady Gaga as the struggling singer he discovers and falls…

Positive Messages

Although parts are more cautionary than inspiring, story offers positive messages about importance of art and music, letting your voice be heard. Promotes idea that show business, particularly music industry, can be demanding, manipulative, forcing artists into easy-to-market types. Reveals how dangerous, disturbing alcohol/drug abuse is, why those with suicidal and addictive personalities need proper therapy, support, rehabilitation. Compassion is a clear theme.

Positive Role Models

Jackson and Ally are both flawed, but they do love each other, respect each other's talents. Jackson is an addict but also a dedicated, committed musician. Ally is supportive, loving but possibly enabling of Jackson's substance abuse until it becomes overwhelming.

Violence & Scariness

A character punches people a couple of times. One scene in which an addict acts erratically/in a disturbing manner in public. Recollections of an abusive father. [Spoiler alert!] A character recalls a failed suicide attempt, later dies by suicide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Frequent kissing. Several sex scenes of varying degrees of intimacy that include shots of bare backs, sides of breasts, etc. Characters are seen in the tub alone and together; there's a quick, nonsexual glimpse of a naked woman's body getting out of a bath. Partial glimpse of a man's buttock as he receives an injection. A drag queen reveals her fake breasts for Jackson to autograph.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent (more than 100 uses) of strong language, including "f--k," "f---ing," "s--t," and, to a lesser degree, "a--hole," "ass," "t-ts," "t-tties," "bitch," "oh my God," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands/products shown include Prius, iPhone, Yamaha piano, Interscope Records, Saturday Night Live , Dodge Ram, Ford, Grammys.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A main character abuses and alcohol, drugs. He drinks to excess, sometimes straight from bottle, also takes prescription and illegal drugs, snorting and injecting them. Other adults drink, too -- at bars, parties, behind the scenes at concerts, at home. A character is visibly stoned/drunk in several scenes, even becoming incontinent/incoherent at times. Part of the movie takes place in residential rehab. Characters smoke cigarettes and marijuana. Both main characters recall their fathers' drinking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that A Star Is Born is the fourth big-screen take on a tragic love story centered around the pitfalls of substance abuse and show business. Starring Bradley Cooper (making his directorial debut) as a stadium-filling rock star and Lady Gaga as the struggling singer he discovers and falls for, this version, like its predecessors, revolves around alcoholism and addiction, so there's lots of drinking and drug use, often to excess. You can also expect strong language in nearly every scene, particularly "f--k" and "s--t." This mature romance has lots of kissing, several love scenes, and a couple instances of partial nudity, both in sexual and nonsexual contexts. And while the movie has messages about the importance of art and letting your voice be heard, it also explores heavy themes, including mental health, substance abuse, depression, suicidal thoughts, and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (37)
• Kids say (59)

Based on 37 parent reviews

Cooper and Gaga shine so bright...one bulb brightens the other one dims

What's the story.

A STAR IS BORN -- actor Bradley Cooper 's directorial debut -- is another take on the tragic love story that was previously turned into movies in 1937, 1954 , and 1976. It tells the story of a musician who falls in love with a talented singer, only to see her fame take off -- and surpass -- his own. Cooper, who also co-wrote the adaptation, stars as Jackson Maine, a hard-drinking, Eddie Vedder-meets-Neil Young-type who discovers Ally ( Lady Gaga ) while she performs at a drag bar and is instantly mesmerized by her talent. The two connect both personally and professionally, and soon Ally is writing, touring, and performing with Jackson, who turns over the stage to her and offers support as she launches her solo career. But as Ally's star begins to rise, Jackson's substance abuse and personal demons overwhelm him, threatening his stability and her dreams.

Is It Any Good?

Cooper's passionate, thoughtful directorial debut is beautifully acted and fabulously shot, making it the best cinematic version to date of this heartbreaking story. It's obvious how immersed in the role Cooper became; his research and commitment to his role -- and to the movie as a whole -- are breathtaking. And in Lady Gaga, he found the perfect co-star to play Ally, a struggling singer with a big voice and a lot to say, but not enough confidence to say it. Cooper and Gaga's chemistry is palpable, and their characters' romance is utterly riveting and realistic. Working from a script he co-wrote with veterans Will Fetters and Eric Roth, Cooper directs the movie to showcase the performances, but also the sensory aspects of fame: the overload of applause and adoration followed by moments of silence and isolation.

The movie's music is fabulous, and it's impressive how well Cooper can hold his own while singing with Lady Gaga. We already knew that she could act, but that Cooper can sing is a revelation. There are many memorable songs, but "Shallow" and "I'll Never Love Again" are particularly powerful and emotional. The music evokes the highs and lows of Jackson and Ally's relationship, and it reveals the difficulty of staying true to your artistic voice in an era when everything -- even a marriage -- can be reduced to marketability. In addition to Gaga, Cooper has rounded up an impressive supporting cast, including Sam Elliott as Jackson's older brother/tour manager, Bobby; Andrew Dice Clay as Ally's proud working-class father; and Dave Chappelle and Hamilton star Anthony Ramos as old friends. There's not a false note in this ultimately heartbreaking remake, and it sets the bar remarkably high for Cooper's continuing career as a director.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the alcohol and drug use in A Star Is Born. How is addiction portrayed? Are there consequences to the substance abuse? Why is that important?

Does watching this movie make you interested in seeing any of the previous versions of the story? Why do you think so many filmmakers in different eras have wanted to revisit this plot?

Jackson believes that music should mean something and is critical of some of the superficial pop songs Ally sings once her career takes off. What do you think? Does all music have to be deep or meaningful?

What motivated Jackson's self-destructive decisions? Were you surprised by the ending, or did you pick up on the foreshadowing?

What is the movie saying about the music business? About fame in general?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 5, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : February 19, 2019
• Cast : Bradley Cooper , Lady Gaga , Sam Elliott
• Director : Bradley Cooper
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Bisexual actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Music and Sing-Along
• Character Strengths : Compassion
• Run time : 135 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language throughout, some sexuality/nudity and substance abuse
• Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe
• Last updated : April 14, 2024

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Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper make (mostly) beautiful music in A Star Is Born : EW review

It’s one of those pop-science facts that always gets repeated, probably because it sounds so tragically, romantically cool: By the time their light reaches earth, thousands of stars in the sky have already died. And it does feel like an apt metaphor for Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine the first time we see him onstage. At fortyish, he’s the kind of mid-career musician who’s already graduated to legend, playing his dusky blues-rock anthems to sold-out stadium crowds who sing every word right back to him. But there’s no joy in it for him anymore, if there ever was; the minute the show is over he heads straight to his chauffeured car to be alone with the bottle that’s always waiting for him.

We’ve seen this movie before, of course — four times now and counting — so we know it’s not A Star Is Bored . Jackson is only minutes away from meeting the young unknown who will make him believe in everything again: Ally (Lady Gaga), a plucky part-time cater-waiter with a pair of sanitary gloves in her pocket and a song in her heart who just happens to be performing at the L.A. drag club Jackson stumbles into in search of more numbing alcohol. He’s enchanted; she’s flattered and confused. By the next morning, at least one of them has fallen a little bit in love.

Gaga’s serious-actress transformation for her first major film role will undoubtedly lead the conversation, and she certainly deserves praise for her restrained, human-scale performance as a singer whose real-girl vulnerability lands miles away from the glittery meat-dress delirium of her own stage persona. And the original songs (most of which Gaga and Cooper share full or partial credit for) are memorably, sturdily melodic —though not the conspicuously flat dance-pop Ally moves toward as her career swerves closer toward the mainstream.

The movie also has some great unexpected supporting turns, including Dave Chappelle as an old Tennessee friend of Jackson’s and Andrew Dice Clay as Ally’s Rat Pack-dreamer dad. Their characters read much realer and more textured than the ones designed to move the plot along, like Ally’s smooth, ruthless manager Rez (Rafi Gavron), a textbook music-industry Machiavelli.

But it’s Cooper, in his directing debut, who ultimately has to carry the film from both sides. He’s talked in interviews about working to drop his voice to a deeper register, and his Jackson is a sort of drawling, denim-clad cowboy-poet very much in the mode of Kris Kristofferson’s iconic 1976 iteration and Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart — an archetype whose familiarity lives somewhere between sincere tribute and Marlboro Man cliché. (He also works in shades of Sam Elliott, who appears in a few pivotal scenes as his much-older brother–slash–manager, and maybe some other Sam too: the late, great Shepard).

Behind the camera, Cooper has clearly pledged allegiance not to the 1937 or 1954 Star s but to the naturalistic New Cinema style of his ’70s predecessor, all long highways, canyon light, and sun-flared closeups. His camera works with a kind of feverish intimacy, closing in as Ally’s profile rises and Jackson stumbles back toward the bottle. That closeness also becomes a bell jar that descends over the film, keeping the audience locked into the couple’s growing unhappiness (and by extension the airless, lonely disconnect of fame).

The run time clocks in at well over two hours, which is longer than it strictly needs to be; though there’s also something gratifying about a major Hollywood production that meanders the way this movie does, without forcing a jazzy excess of new characters and conflicts on the narrative.If the ending is telegraphed from miles away, and the central romance feels more like a gorgeously patina-ed imitation of life than the real thing, maybe that’s because Star is less a story now than a myth — not so much reborn as recast and passed on to the care of the next generation. B+

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'A Star Is Born' Review: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga Deliver One of 2018's Best Movies

There’s an interesting quandary at the center of “ A Star Is Born, ” or at least in the latest interpretation of this classic Hollywood yarn: Who do we relate to, identify with, in this story of star-crossed career paths -- the impressionable young ingenue, or the seasoned veteran?

Bradley Cooper ’s directorial debut makes a convincing case for both, thanks not only to music that bolsters the credibility of both rugged singer-songwriter Jackson Maine (Cooper) and aspiring pop star Ally ( Lady Gaga ), but motivations that seem to exist both within the actors performing them, and the careers those performers have developed for themselves outside the actual narrative. Either way, Cooper’s film is a remarkable, addictive piece of Hollywood myth-making that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen and in the loudest theater possible.

Cooper (“American Sniper”) plays Jackson, a grizzled musician with as many poetic insights about art as he does addictions. One night after a gig, he wanders into a drag bar for a cocktail where he stumbles across Ally (Gaga), a waitress who’s all but given up on the possibility of stardom outside of singing “La Vie En Rose” for the local queens. He takes an immediate shine to her -- and her talent -- and the two quickly slide into a tender courtship, him pulling her onstage to sing duets in front of thousands of fans, and her pulling him into bed, and later, the studio to collaborate. Despite Ally’s insistence she won’t enable his addictions, his self-destructive behavior continues to guide his life and derail his career, even as she finds a manager (Rafi Gavron, “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist”) and acquiesces to the demands of pop stardom --to enormous success, but at the expense of a few of the qualities Jackson first fell in love with.

But as their personal and professional relationships fall into relief with one another, they’re forced to reflect on the time they have shared, and make some difficult decisions about what sort of future each wants -- both as musicians and as lovers.

It sounds like a criticism to say that there aren’t many surprises in “A Star Is Born,” but the familiarity of this particular kind of love story -- with or without that title -- practically demands a boilerplate approach, and there’s something wonderfully reassuring about the way its rhythms unfold. At the same time, the successful execution of that formula requires great performances, and this film delivers like gangbusters with Cooper and Gaga bringing the characters’ talent and chemistry to vibrant life.

Gaga has some truly spectacular instincts as an actress -- her early scenes, when Ally is the most “ordinary,” are just riveting to watch, and she perfectly plays against Cooper’s confounded joy as Jackson, discovering a creative (and romantic) inspiration he’d long thought extinguished. The music further communicates their respective personalities and bolsters the legitimacy of his established -- and her ascendant -- success, conveying their artistic compatibility but also the stark differences between what they want and what they have to offer (not to mention their ages and levels of experience).

There is a sort of curious footnote to the movie, however, where Gaga is the greater authority than Cooper: She knows and has intimately experienced the rise, and the obstacles to modern pop stardom, and she comes from a generation where “selling out,” so to speak, is no longer a crime against art, and, in fact, is seemingly something to aspire to. (Certainly, she has not compromised herself in her own career, but she has a more immediate relationship with those pitfalls and perhaps a more comfortable relationship with the prospect of going big, broad, and commercial.)

It makes her performance more sympathetic to some of the less desirable, or maybe respectable, tasks that Ally eventually must take on, or chooses to take on; Ally is a born songwriter and singer, but the music she ends up making barely resembles what first creatively drives her, which isn’t “bad” (well, some of it is) but it creates this very interesting meta-commentary on the paths of these two artists and the kinds of art they create. Does a musician need to bear the emotional weight of their life experiences with every song they write? In an age where everything is sold, is it really a compromise for her to perform a song about how good her man looks in his jeans, if she got to write it herself? The movie doesn’t answer, but it’s an ongoing dialogue the movie has as these characters shift their power positions in the relationship, and in their careers.

As a director, Cooper maintains a remarkably equitable balance between the theatricality of this story and what might approximate a sense of “realism." More than anything else, however, Cooper creates a feeling in his characters and their journeys that feels absolutely right (for the story) and emotionally believable. In examining Jackson’s alcoholism, he treats the subject (forgive the pun) soberly, showcasing the character’s self-awareness and his shame in destroying beautiful moments and opportunities for the people he loves. In following Ally’s transformation, he does not judge the changes that she makes -- even when they seem to violate the core of who she is -- and why she felt like she couldn’t succeed before she met Jackson.

Ultimately just a magical, musical experience -- romantic and tragic and irresistibly propulsive -- “A Star Is Born” is certainly the kind of movie that seems likely to win awards as the end of the year approaches, but it carries the increasingly rare distinction of being one that feels like it actually and honestly earns the accolades it receives.

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A Star Is Born Review

Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga turn to Hollywood's favorite creation myth in order to permanently recreate how we see them.

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Several times throughout A Star is Born , Bradley Cooper purrs the lyrics, “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” We think he doth protest too much, particularly in a film that so lovingly updates not only a few old ways of moviemaking, but also a very specific, older Hollywood myth. Indeed, Cooper’s pensive directorial debut, which likewise stands as a remarkable introduction for Lady Gaga in the role of movie star, is the fourth version of this tale (not counting the many knockoffs) in which a fading star gives birth in his last gasp of fame to a new pop culture sun. Like the misbegotten 1976 version with Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, 2018’s A Star is Born moves the showbiz fable from movie studios to the music industry. But unlike that vanity project, Cooper uses American entertainment’s favorite creation myth to recreate how audiences will forever perceive him and Gaga.

Drawing from a well-worn yarn about the price of fame and the anguish of losing it, it is via an unexpected intimacy that Cooper is able to craft something refreshing and unique. Like an acoustic cover of a brassy old standard, he strips away the glitz and bombast to make a passion play that feels raw and unplugged. Garbling his way through a slurring Western drawl, his protagonist Jackson Maine already seems to have one foot in the darkness off-stage right when he accidentally stumbles into a bar after midnight. Despite being technically a drag queen event on this given night, Gaga’s Ally remains the local diva of the haunt due to her undeniable talent—talent that even while in a drunken stupor Jackson takes an immediate shine toward.

Having almost entirely given up her dreams of ever making it in the music industry—a disappointment that her father constantly echoes in her ear (played by an unrecognizable Andrew Dice Clay)—Ally is initially very reluctant to believe Jackson’s effusive praise that she is a great songwriter, a great singer… and even a great beauty. In fact, it’s been her nose that she reveals has kept her from ever being taken seriously as a talent by anyone remotely adjacent to the music industry, but that nose suits Jackson just fine, especially when he can kiss beneath it or look up toward it when she’s dragging him off the floor. Soon enough, he is bringing her onstage and, like the title says, a star is born.

It could be easy to dismiss Cooper’s aging rocker “discovering” Lady Gaga when, in fact, Gaga has very obviously made it in the music industry for almost a decade now. Yet the film offers an honest commentary about the price of fame today, and the concessions the likes of Gaga or her character Ally must make. The real Gaga, Stefani Germanotta, struggled for years as a singer-songwriter until she embraced the pop star aesthetic in the extreme, so much so that many often forget the talent beneath all the performance art. A Star is Born removes the artifice to re-introduce the frequently overlooked skills of Germanotta, who also co-wrote most of the original songs in the movie, before building her back up into another pop star version of Gaga.

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It is that trajectory which makes this arguably the most creative remake of A Star is Born , for unlike the other versions, this is less a reconfiguration of the Svengali archetype as it is a man on the verge of breaking—he’s even a rock star going deaf—simply letting a young woman make herself. Ally breaks into the music industry without the pop aesthetic and without Jackson doing more than giving her a microphone, which makes their subsequent marriage and its bittersweet trajectory more emotionally poignant rather than manipulative or saccharine.

There is an undeniable grace with how Cooper builds his film, in which he plays a convincingly greasy, crooning cowboy who has more to do with the indie scene of Austin than modern Top 40 radio. And by casting Sam Elliot as Jackson’s older brother—their father had Cooper’s character late in life—he also allows himself to borrow Elliot’s gravelly roar to accompany the popping blood vessels in his red face whenever he gets on stage. This complemented by Gaga—the astonishing singer—creates a harmony that can never last. Yet its elegiac refrain for most of the film’s first two acts gives the film a soulful chorus that is sure to worm its way into many audiences’ memory. As does a wistful cameo by Dave Chappelle.

The film is again a major coup for Gaga. Having already appeared in front of the camera to lesser effect on multiple seasons of American Horror Story , she has never seemed more natural or at ease as an actor than in A Star is Born . Intentionally recreating her heroine as the opposite of the ingénue archetype, Gaga does well with the material and crackles against Cooper, even as the film wisely uses careful scripting and editing to play to Gaga’s acting strengths. Appearing to have a set range, Gaga seems less comfortable with moments of extreme duress, yet can dominate the entire frame when a mic is in her hand or when warily exposing Ally’s (and maybe even her own) vulnerabilities to Jackson.

In truth, A Star is Born is a multi-pronged star vehicle. It offers a showcase for Gaga’s many talents, as well as a marker for Cooper’s arrival as a major directorial one. With confidence and an adept eye for gliding cameras and Steadicam shots, Cooper displays a swagger every bit as broad as his own onscreen cowpoke, whose ever-darkening gloom is the real centerpiece performance of the movie. One that will likely be in constant discussion all the way until Oscar’s telecast.

Yet despite returning to one of Hollywood’s favorite bedtime stories as his opening salvo, Cooper offers audiences a mature and remarkably adult melodrama at a time when such stories seem almost forgotten by the increasingly juvenile industry. The third act veers into the maudlin destinies of the original film, but for the first time since 1937, we have A Star is Born  that is as comfortable in the dark as in the light, which makes it all the brighter.

A Star is Born premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens nationwide on Oct. 5.

further reading: The Must See Movies of 2018

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David Crow is the Film Section Editor at Den of Geek. He’s also a member of the Online Film Critics Society. Read more of his work here . You can follow him on Twitter @DCrowsNest .

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‘A Star Is Born’ Review: Lady Gaga Shines in Bradley Cooper’s Cover of the Enduring Musical — Venice

Michael nordine.

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To hear Bradley Cooper ’s crooner in “ A Star Is Born ” tell it, music is the same story being told over and over again — just 12 notes between each octave, all of them eventually repeating. The magic lies in how they’re expressed. That’s a fitting note to hit in the fourth iteration of a story that’s proven more enduring than most songs written when the first “Star” was born 81 years ago, and it’s key to appreciating Cooper’s arrangement as more than just a cover.

You don’t see “A Star Is Born” to actually watch a star being born, at least not anymore. Maybe you did in 1937, when William Wellman first brought the story to screen; or 17 years later, when Judy Garland led the best (and best-known) version of this enduring Hollywood fable; or even in 1976, when Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson tried to prove the third time’s the charm. But not now, when both Cooper and Lady Gaga have been shining bright for a full decade.

So why watch “A Star Is Born” in 2018, when Cooper’s directorial debut is premiering in Venice as part of a world tour that’s clearly meant to crescendo on a certain stage in Hollywood next year? The answer, it turns out, is Gaga. Already a Golden Globe winner for her work on “American Horror Story,” the pop star is resplendent as a diamond-in-the-rough singer whose booming voice and subtle expressions would make her predecessors proud. Credit to Cooper for delivering his best, most soulful performance while pulling double duty behind the camera, but it’s his co-star whose magnetism most draws you into their world — and keeps you there even when the film hits the occasional wrong note.

In part that’s because she instantly makes you believe in her Ally as a no-name talent despite already being one of the most successful singers on the planet. Unassuming but obviously special, she speaks at length about how showbiz power brokers like her voice but not her looks; given the extravagance of the pop star’s usual costumes, it’s almost like you’re seeing her for the first time. Even with everything Gaga’s already done, “A Star Is Born” feels like a coming-out party for her. Cooper is a co-lead but, in much the same way that his Jackson Maine takes Ally on tour and facilitates her burgeoning superstardom, it often feels like his onscreen goal is to play second fiddle and help us see that, as both an actress and a singer, his co-star is a singular talent.

At times this is the most immersive concert film this side of the late, great Jonathan Demme, the camera just feet from Jackson as he downs a handful of pills with a swig of vodka before picking up his guitar and launching into his set. His own star has begun to fade somewhat — though Jackson’s twangy, country-inflected rock ballads still draw crowds — but he isn’t the only one in this constellation. Their duets are even better, feeling far less staged than filmed performances tend to, with Cooper’s raw approach offering what feels like a behind-the-scenes look at two actual musicians falling in love onstage.

A fall-down drunk who manages to stay standing on his better nights, Jackson self-medicates not only for the typical sad-musician reasons but also to distract from the ringing in his ears that’s never going away and will only get worse as time goes on. The meet-cute comes when he stumbles into a bar for a post-concert drink and sees Ally deliver a stirring rendition of “La Vie en rose” that would make even Marion Cotillard blush, and it isn’t just the booze talking when he tells her she’s beautiful — the man is clearly smitten, and it’s nearly impossible not to share his admiration. Their immediate, highly sensual chemistry proves to be the film’s most compelling element, as well as its most combustible; you don’t have to sing Édith Piaf songs to know there’s nothing like amour fou .

Cooper, whose “American Sniper” became the most financially successful film of 2014 on the back of quote-unquote Real America, manages to appeal to that same set while also setting a key scene in a bar celebrating drag night. More than just a cover artist, he brings a sense of experiential urgency to the proceedings that makes them feel new again (even if it’s difficult to overlook the irony of Jackson’s most popular tune beiginning with the line “Maybe it’s time the let the old ways die…” in this, the fourth version of a very old story).

But these better tendencies give way to a more familiar tale of alcoholism, recovery, and the perils of overnight stardom. It’s here that Cooper is hobbled by the source material, as though he feels obligated to hit the same narrative beats (and, in broad strokes, he’s largely telling the same story) as his predecessors and isn’t as adept at riffing on them. The film itself feels like a kind of duet, and suffers when the two aren’t sharing the screen. “Star” is less compelling as it expands its focus beyond their central relationship and toward its overarching ideas, some of which can’t help but feel like the plot contrivances they are — not least because most aren’t given the time they need to fully breathe, even with a runtime of two hours and 15 minutes.

Of those, the first 40 are by far the most immersive. Covering a whirlwind 24 hours during which the two lovers meet, fall in love, and perform onstage together for the first time, they make for a soaring, borderline transcendent first act that will stay stuck in your head after the credits roll.

“A Star Is Born” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Warner Bros. will release it in theaters on October 5.

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