Bradley Cooper
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Connections, in both directions
In Bradley Cooper’s strong feature directorial debut A Star Is Born – a remake of the three namesake films that came before, touchstones of their generations as much as this one will be – Lady Gaga makes her indelible mark as a true blue movie star of the highest calibre, a designation earned only by her undertaking considerable risk that has paid off against odds more stacked than one might readily admit.
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.
Telling the downfall story requires more finesse than A Star Is Born is able to manage — the Garland version does this very well and it’s inevitable that this version will always be compared to the ones before it.
The parallel trajectory of a star on the rise and another on the downhill skid has been popular fodder for Hollywood since its first incarnation in the 1932 drama What Price Hollywood?
Bradley Cooper makes an assured directorial debut with this fourth mounting (fifth if you count the original inspiration, 1932's What Price Hollywood?) of the venerable tale of two talents falling in love as their careers head in opposite directions.
The earliest riff on the story, also directed by Cukor and produced by David O. Selznick, is frankly titled What Price Hollywood?, with certain different details—a love triangle, a child—but the outcomes and themes the same.
There have been four other versions, starting with the George Cukor-directed “What Price Hollywood?”
(This is the fourth screen remake, if the 1932 film “What Price Hollywood?”
Cooper has a pleasant twang when he sings, projecting a melancholy, afternoon-y vibe that brings to mind Crazy Heart.
His past-his-prime alcoholic singer is channeling Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart for sure, which isn’t a bad thing.
I get the comparison, but a twenty years younger version of Jeff Bridgescharacter in Crazy Heart (while his career was still booming despite an approaching decline) is probably more apt.
(If you never saw “Crazy Heart,” or how forgot how good it is, catch up.
As in Crazy Heart, a similarly excellent movie starring Jeff Bridges, it starts with quiet menace lurking in the wings and ends in a display of humiliation so sharp you can’t help but cringe from it.
Cooper sings decently enough to be convincing, but his performance overall feels rather like a reboot of Jeff Bridges’ turn as Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart” (or even his Rooster Cogburn, to tell the truth).
It’s reminiscent of the way Bette Midler’s already established cult fame was negotiated in Mark Rydell’s terrific The Rose (1979), which, though inspired by the life of Janis Joplin, used details from Midler’s early career to effectively queer that text.
In 1979's The Rose, Bette Midler is a Janis Joplin-like superstar, on the verge of flaming out, but only after her hangers-on milk her for everything she's got.
With way more than a passing nod to Barbra Streisand (circa “Funny Girl” as much as the 1976 “Star Is Born”), Gaga (née Stefanie Joanne Angelina Germanotta) ends up being the ideal headliner for this wish-fulfillment fantasy that nevertheless keeps its feet planted on the ground.
Early in her career, in films like Funny Girl , The Way We Were , and 1976’s A Star is Born , Barbra Streisand basically played a variation of the same character over and over again — an unconventional beauty who was both deeply talented and touchingly insecure.
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”).
But if 2011’s The Artist was an homage, this is more of a burlesque, a hot mess of a movie that takes its dramatic cues from the camp excesses of the drag queens among whom our hammered hero finds the lucky Lady.
If you’re looking for an original and surprising variation on A Star Is Born , you’d be better advised to turn to Michel Hazanavicius’ silent film The Artist (2011) than to this downbeat and surprisingly lugubrious version.
You can even count The Artist, the Best Picture winner from 2011, in that camp.
Maya Hawke's performance as daughter Jamie Bernstein, for instance, recalls Dan Futterman's character from The Birdcage — a straight scion who resents their queer parents.
When Ally freshens up in Jackson’s hotel room by rubbing a towel under her arms, audiences will be reminded of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan , blasting her armpits with an upturned hand-dryer.
The movie is reminiscent of the 1994 Meg Ryan/Andy Garcia drama, When a Man Loves a Woman , in the way it successfully conflates romantic elements with the darker aspects of addiction.
Cooper’s movie reminded me of Shana Feste’s underrated Nashville saga from 2010, “Country Strong,” in which a hopeful male singer under the spell and tutelage of a female superstar comes to realize the underlying contradiction of his aspirations and concludes, “I don’t think that love and fame can live in the same place.”
Eventually, the film feels more akin to something like Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born in its exploration of romance, music, conflict, and tragedy.
This is a musical, but a diegetic one, a la A Star Is Born…
We’re soon whisked off on an A Star Is Born-style ascent…
It continues in the vein of his earlier films “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012) and “The Duke of Burgundy” (2014), which delivered magnificently cracked, pitch-perfect homages to Italian giallo horror movies and European sexploitation flicks, respectively.
She's green as a thespian (stints on F/X's “American Horror Story” and Robert Rodriguez's “Machete Kills” notwithstanding), and that quality matches Ally's initial fear and insecurity about her musical chops.
According to IMDB, she’s already appeared on the big screen in “Machete Kills” “Muppets Most Wanted” (as herself) and “Men in Black 3” as “alien on TV monitors.”
The music can’t compare to recent song-heavy films like “Sing Street” and “Begin Again.”
Bradley Cooper has managed to assemble an utter powerhouse of a film that feels like a gritty La La Land, or the older kid John Carney’s Begin Again was told not to hang around with.
Recent films like Inside Llewyn Davis, Begin Again, Straight Outta Compton and Sing Street excel at linking the music each character is making to their emotional mindset; why say it when you can sing it?
And in 1973, Hrishikesh Mukherjee made the wonderful Abhimaan , about a marriage between two singers, which falls apart when the newbie wife becomes a bigger success than the husband.
In 1983's Eddie and the Cruisers, a bar band struggles to defy the public's expectations for what they can be.
It is arguably the most cringe-inducing awards show scene committed to film since Pia Zadora’s unintentionally hilarious bit in “The Lonely Lady” (1983).
It felt like her take on 1991’s “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” but with a vital difference.
The early scenes, where Jackson discovers Ally and hangs out with her, have a loose, let’s-see-what-happens vibe that’s closer to the Before Sunrise movies than this film’s previous versions.
And the two have a surplus of that, forging a playful, smoldering connection over the Before Sunrise up-all-night meet-cute of the film’s extended opening act.
As her blue-collar, bridge-and-tunnel dad (a delightful turn by Andrew Dice Clay) learns of the connection and pushes her to grasp the opportunity, Gaga gets to briefly occupy the same shallows as Liza Minnelli’s character in Arthur (the Garland family are never far from our thoughts).