A Star Is Born is a movie that has been remade, I think, three times. So including the original, there are four different ways to watch this tale. Recently, I decided to give the 2018 iteration a go. This is because I made a playlist on Spotify of songs by bands and artists that don’t really exist, and I keep finding myself listening to the Academy Award winning song “Shallow” from this movie.

The film follows country music star Jackson Maine after one of his shows, and we are very early on treated to scenes of him popping pills and downing a ton of booze. So it’s obvious from the out that Jackson has his demons. While trying to find a bar in which to drink, Jack encounters the ultra-talented and undiscovered Ally at a drag bar.

Jack is wowed by her ability, and the two end up spending the night driving around the town together and getting to know each other. Along the way, Ally reveals her own penchant for writing original songs by singing a few bars of one to him.

In the ensuing days, Jack convinces Ally to fly out to another of his shows where he surprises her by bringing her on stage to perform a full version of the tune she sang for him. This is all just the beginning of their relationship, and that’s what A Star Is Born is about: Jack and Ally’s dynamics as they navigate a burgeoning pop career for her and their growing love for each other.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Bradley Cooper is amazing in this. Lady Gaga is excellent, too, make no mistake, but Cooper is the star of the show. The way he affects Sam Elliott’s voice as his own, and the emotional weight of his journey, and his chemistry with Gaga. It’s all spectacular. He does such a great job as the lead in this film. I can easily understand how he got nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards for this effort. The only thing I don’t get is the Academy’s infatuation with musician biopics that cost him a possibly well-deserved win. Not that Bohemian Rhapsody is a bad movie, and we all love Freddie Mercury, but I would put Cooper’s performance over Rami Malek’s.

And yeah, as noted, Lady Gaga is wonderful here, too, but most of her role is in her singing, and we all already knew she could do that. But even in her singing… take the scene where she first performs “Shallow” with Jackson. You can feel her character being mortified that she is on stage, even as she gives herself over to her massive talent and takes command of the song. Her mannerisms and reactions are so realistic and communicative. It’s extremely well-done. What a great pair of actors this movie had upon which to hang its hang.

+ The music is very good, especially “Shallow” and the song that Ally sings on SNL. The latter is very catchy, and the former is just powerful. Do I like musicals? Between watching La La Land last year and Kpop Demon Hunters earlier this year–and loving both of those–maybe I just do. Maybe I ought to quit fighting it.

More likely, I just adore well-told romance movies and fun anime. But still! That’s three musicals I have watched in the last year, and I’ve been a big fan of each one. I never considered myself a musical kind of guy, but maybe it is time to reconsider. Les Miserables made me cry when it came out, too. Damn. Bear with me; I’m having an epiphany.

– I feel like this movie introduces plot points and then doesn’t come back around to them. It sets up early on that Ally has a temper and gets physically violent with people easily, but that never comes back into the picture. Ally pointedly tells Jack she will never ride his motorcycle if he has been drinking, but that event never unfolds, either. It just feels like I expected both of those bits to matter over the long haul, but they don’t. 

The motorcycle bit in particular… I was shocked that never looped back into the plot. To the point where, when Ally delivered that line, I chuckled and said to myself “Oh, Chekhov’s motorcycle, eh?”. But no… Chekhov forgot all about that little gun apparently.

I guess you could argue that Ally’s early movie violence is more to show that she has feelings for Jack and will defend him, but when I saw those moments, I thought there was more there. A hint of different foreshadowing. I thought we were getting the self-destructive love affair of an addict and someone with anger issues. But… not so much.

– A Star Is Born might actually undersell Jack’s drinking and drug use. It’s obviously a big part of the movie, but I feel like it could have gone harder showing how hard it is to care for someone who does that. Maybe that’s just my personal experience speaking, but I was looking for more there. I want to say it just made Jack’s addictions feel more awkward than devastating.

There is a scene where Jackson hits rock bottom by peeing himself on stage at Ally’s Grammy win. It came across as more comical than anything else. And it portrays addiction as like the worst thing a sufferer or it can do is embarrass you. But real addicts are cruel and lying and manipulative and abusive and absent. As someone who has dealt with addiction in loved ones, trust me: I’d kill for the worst thing they’d have done is to pee on stage.

-Surprise third, minor down to my wife for spoiling the ending of this movie to me when I was halfway through! Sure it’s seven years old, but I didn’t know how it ended, and then she just gave it away! Just a reminder to be careful with your spoilers, people!

OVERALL

Apparently, A Star Is Born is just the kind of movie that is right up my alley, who’d have guessed? And I appropriately dug the hell out of it. The performances are true stand-out material, and the story is gripping and emotionally investing. There are some small problems I had with the narrative and storytelling, but those barely wedged at all again how much I enjoyed this.