A Star is Born
As “A Star is Born” unfolded on-screen, I thought about “Almost Famous.” I haven’t seen any of the previous versions of this story over the decades, so there are other points of references for me when it comes to stories of musicians touching the edges of success, and Cameron Crowe’s is the one that has hit me hardest over the years. Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, however, isn’t quite the personal story Crowe’s film is, but a film about rising to stardom, and the jealousy and pain that can breed in a relationship between two artists.
We start as Jackson Maine, Cooper’s country rock singer, is on stage for a show, and his routine afterwards that involves drinking and drug use. He asks his driver to stop at a bar nearby, unable to wait for where he is staying. The bar he happens to walk into is a drag bar, and it’s here when he gets his first look at Ally (Lady Gaga), a former waitress at the bar that is getting ready to perform. He is immediately taken with her, and a backstage meeting becomes a heart-to-heart evening where he draws her talent for songwriting, and revealing herself, out of her. Soon, they are performing together at his shows, and she is starting to have some interest in her solo career from others. They stay together, but her skyrocketing star, and his alcoholism, are making their relationship tenuous, at best.
While the film went about its business, and the script by Eric Roth, Will Fetters and Cooper hit all of the beats of this familiar story, I felt that it made sense that a new version of this story finally happened. Each other one- in 1937, 1954 and 1976- reflected the type of entertainment, and especially music, industry, that existed at the time, and Cooper’s film is about a modern one, where a singer’s star can rise thanks to a video on YouTube, and “hip” management can transform a singer into a complete different type of star. As Ally joins Maine on stage at the start, it’s very much in his country rock idiom, even though the first time we see her in the bar, she’s very much a torch singer. But when a manager, Rez (Rafi Gavron), gets her doing her own music, the result is the more Top 40 pop sound we associate Gaga with in real life, and that tension between the paired-down performing she did with Mayne and the pop icon she is transformed into is one of the most interesting dynamics in the film to watch unfold. It’s not just Maine’s alcoholism that makes their relationship tough- there’s also a worry in him of her losing her voice as an artist, of not staying true to what he heard in her in that bar, and on that night together. Her ascent is mirrored in his descent, though, and that’s always been the central emotional hook of this story, and Cooper performs that descent with a genuine pain and heartache I haven’t seen from him since “Silver Linings Playbook.” Jackson’s dealing with Tinnitus in his ears, which is part of why he’s always drinking and doing drugs, although you feel like he’s maybe never done a show sober in his life as he has run away from childhood traumas, where his parents were gone by 13, and he was left to be raised by his much older brother, played here by Sam Elliot in an impactful performance. He hits rock bottom when he ruins her moment of glory at the Grammys, and though she is all about him getting healthy, others around her see him as a liability, leading to an ending where the waterworks are raised to 11.
If Cooper is the drum beat of this 2 1/4-hour song, Lady Gaga is the chorus that makes it soar. We already were aware of her as a magnetic performer from the last decade of her career, and a Super Bowl performance two years ago cemented it, but she holds her own on screen with Cooper as an actor in this film. The first time she gets on stage with Maine to sing a song she shared with him that night (“Shallows”), we see her come into her own by the end of the surprise performance. One of the things Cooper is wise to do here is to let Gaga’s Ally perform songs in their entirety during many of these performances, and while it makes the film feel a bit overlong, it’s hard to really argue against it since the musical interludes are so beautiful to watch, and they distill many of the feelings going on in the film. It’s on stage when this film really finds its center, and Cooper and his cinematographer- the great Matthew Libatique (who also shot “Venom”)- do a phenomenal job of capturing the energy of live performances in different venues, and the way the lights show on the performers is one of the things that stand out in this film almost as much as the music. The songs, regardless of genre, are fantastic, and the emotions flowing through them, and the performances given by Cooper and Lady Gaga, get to the heart of what great musical cinema is capable of. It’s the opposite of what I felt was going on in a lot of this summer’s “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!,” which was just celebrity karaoke, for the most part. This is a film about real people, using music to express something deep in them that needs to come out. From beginning to end, what comes out is resonate and passionate, and brings out the best in its stars.
