Jackson, a famous country-rock singer, meets the struggling singer Ally who pays her bills by working as a waitress. He falls in love with her and motivates her to perform live on stage, together with him. Ally gains a manager, Rez, who helps her establish fame as a singer. Congruent with her rise to fame and a Grammy win, Jackson stumbles due to his alcoholism and drugs intake. Jackson and Ally get married, and he decides to take up therapy to give up drugs. Fearing he might be a detriment to Ally’s career, Jackson committs suicide.
For his feature length debut film as a director, Bradley Cooper picked the 4th adaptation-remake of “A Star is Born”, and even though this is kind of an oversaturation of the same old story by this point, he still managed to assemble an honest, quality little film that works the most thanks to the chemistry between the two main actors. In that respect, his pick of singer Lady Gaga as the leading actress was a strange, but ultimately correct choice: she has a sixth sense for harmony during her singing sessions, giving an authentic seal to the scenes, and is also a surprisingly good actress during dramatic moments, maybe because she showed her fragile, human, true self, without her trademark exotic make up or costumes. Sadly, the writing is rather routine, and the execution standard to truly give some new take on the same storyline where one artist sinks while the other ascents to fame.
The weakest sequence is the Grammy awards moment: at first, it works because it shows how Jackson struggles to play on stage because he is either drunk or under drugs. But the sequence becomes excessive and ridiculous when Ally goes on stage to pick up the award, while Jackson falls and remains lying on the stairs, then stands up, mumbles something, stands next to Ally—and then pees his own pants on camera. The first part was subtle, all the rest was just unconvincing hammering of the same point, just dumber. Aggravating this is the problem that the viewers are never sure why Jackson is insisting on ruining everything so much: he is famous, has someone who loves him, has a future, but chooses to be a wreck for alcohol and coccaine. The sequence where Ally is in a bathtub, for instance— Jackson starts an argument by calling her ugly, but we just don’t buy it. It seems like an argument just for drama sake, not because it has real motivation. The best moments are when Jackson and Ally are infatuated with each other: he has uplifting words for her (“All you got is you and what you have to say to people and they are listening right now and they are not going to be listening forever”), or the sequence when she jokingly sings just to him, in private, only for him to later on repeat that same song on stage, in front of the audience, to “invite” her to sing with him.
Grade:++
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