A Star Is Born | Movie Review | Lady Gaga’s first film in a lead role

A Star Is Born movie is on one hand is Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut while on the other hand, its Lady Gaga’s first film in a lead role. A Star is Born seems to have delighted most critics. The trailer for the movie released in June and received a lot of attention. The film, that is the remake of the original 1937 film of the same name, has an impressive 94% rating at the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes so far. It was screened at the Venice Film Festival. Out of 18 reviews, only 1 is negative.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the movie the perfect 5-star rating. He said, “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.”

IndieWire’s Michael Nordine was sure who was the real star of A Star is Born. He said, “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.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt wrote, “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.”

Time Magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek singled out Bradley Cooper’s unpretentious direction in her review. She wrote, “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.” A Star is Born releases on October 5.

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.

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.

Behind the camera, Cooper has clearly pledged allegiance not to the 1937 or 1954 Stars 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.

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.