A Star Is Born (2018)

I'm somewhat patchy and probably a little out of step on my Hollywood legends and iconography—I've never much liked All About Eve, for example, have little use for the Oscars ceremony or its fruits, and have seen only three of the previous four versions of A Star Is Born (counting the 1932 What Price Hollywood?—the Barbra Streisand vehicle is the one I skipped). But there is plenty of juice to this Bradley Cooper version, and I'm not just talking about the drinking. Cooper directed, cowrote, and stars in it. The meteoric rise it charts of Ally the nobody (Lady Gaga) happens with lightning speed and is truly thrilling, certainly when she takes to the big stage for the first time. When Lady Gaga opens up with that aching wailing bellowing thing she does it was all over for me—she elevates the whole thing to next realms and it's not hard to understand why Jack the country star (Cooper) has such faith in her. I had already seen bits of these sequences in the trailer, one of the very few that lit me up regularly this year on my forays out, and so the first half of A Star Is Born felt a little like the long version from the album. Really great stuff. I will also say I've never shared the antipathy toward Bradley Cooper as some kind of uniquely abhorrent pretty-boy phony. Is it something about The Hangover? Me, I can't really see much difference between Cooper and, say, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal, or Brad Pitt. I liked the TV show Alias, I like Limitless quite a bit, and weak outings such as Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle just never bothered me—others are worse in those two movies alone (*cough* Robert De Niro *cough*). And Cooper is trying very hard for credibility here—it's hard to say at this point whether he is looking for Oscar gold, additional directing gigs, or what. But he is looking for something. He not only cowrote and directed this latest installment of a venerable Hollywood institution, but he also learned to play the guitar and sing country for the starring role. As Jack the country star, he is convincingly lost in himself, with a rumbling whiskey-soaked voice that feels like it already has one foot in the grave. The scenes of him before Ally, isolated in the deep shadows of limo backseats and backstage chaos, pulling on quart bottles of booze, are certain pictures of desperation. The back half of the picture, with everything going sour except Ally's career, felt more pro forma and much less convincing to me. But the breakout scenes were so amazing I could sit there in the dark still in thrall to them and feel friendly toward the picture even as the tired old story of fame and bad faith and drunkenness unreeled—some of it, such as a Grammy scene, just impossible to believe. Gaga and Cooper may not have much chemistry and Gaga especially may feel tentative and a little unsure of herself in places. Yet they are not hard at all to watch. When Gaga sings she is almost always riveting and she is often singing. Kudos to Cooper for playing the whole thing so well.