A Star is Born

The great­est trick Bradley Coop­er ever pulled was con­vinc­ing the world it need­ed anoth­er remake of A Star is Born. It’s not sim­ply that the premise feels so famil­iar by now – a glossy dra­ma about a promi­nent male celebri­ty help­ing a young star­let to achieve her dream just seems like a hard sell in the age of #MeToo. In updat­ing this appar­ent­ly time­less cau­tion­ary tale for a mod­ern audi­ence, how­ev­er, Coop­er proves a good cov­er can work just as well as the original.

In terms of its basic struc­ture and tone, this new ver­sion most close­ly resem­bles Frank Pierson’s 1974 film, which paired Bar­bra Streisand’s bright-eyed bar singer with Kris Kristofferson’s hard-drink­ing rock­er. Yet there’s a pinch of Gold­en Age mag­ic here too, with sub­tle nods to George Cukor’s 1954 clas­sic, star­ring Judy Gar­land and James Mason, and David O Selznick’s Tech­ni­col­or orig­i­nal from 1937 (itself a remake of Cukor’s more apt­ly titled What Price Hol­ly­wood? from 1932), with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.

Iron­i­cal­ly for a stu­dio movie that’s osten­si­bly about the pit­falls of show busi­ness, Cooper’s film has a trou­bled pro­duc­tion his­to­ry. Sev­er­al high-pro­file names, includ­ing Leonar­do DiCaprio and Chris­t­ian Bale, were said to be eye­ing the project at dif­fer­ent stages, and at one point Clint East­wood and Bey­on­cé were attached (as direc­tor and star respec­tive­ly). While we’ll nev­er know what strange fruits that unlike­ly col­lab­o­ra­tion might have borne, we’ll always have Coop­er and Gaga.

The for­mer is Jack­son Maine, a rugged rock ​’n’ roll sex god who picks up hon­ey-voiced ingénue Ally (Lady Gaga) at a drag bar after hear­ing her per­form a sul­try ren­di­tion of Édith Piaf’s ​‘La Vie En Rose’. (Don’t wor­ry, it’s made clear to him that Ally is the only ​‘real’ woman in the joint). Their meet-cute is hard­ly the stuff of clas­sic Hol­ly­wood romance: he gets blind drunk, she punch­es a ran­dom bloke for both­er­ing Jack with a self­ie request, they buy snacks and reme­di­al frozen peas at a 24-hour super­mar­ket, and final­ly, he harass­es her into join­ing him on the next leg of his nation­wide sta­di­um tour.

Through­out this heady first encounter, a curi­ous amount of atten­tion is paid to the size, shape and gen­er­al appear­ance of Ally’s nose, which she cites as the rea­son why no tal­ent scout has tak­en a sec­ond look at her. Jack­son jumps in to reas­sure her that she is, in fact, beau­ti­ful just the way she is. But more impor­tant­ly he has the means and will to make her a star. It’s always slight­ly uncom­fort­able, not to men­tion reduc­tive, when a film high­lights a female character’s per­ceived phys­i­cal flaw in a bid to make her seem more real and relat­able. That said, there is more than a ker­nel of truth in Ally’s asser­tion that the music indus­try is an image-obsessed, male-dom­i­nat­ed beast.

Ally’s hard­ships, how­ev­er, are mere­ly the back­ing track in this bit­ter­sweet-sound­ing bal­lad. Despite Gaga’s cap­ti­vat­ing per­for­mance and easy chem­istry with Coop­er, it’s her co-star who takes cen­tre stage as Jackson’s self-destruc­tive behav­iour threat­ens to destroy more than his partner’s flour­ish­ing pop career. Even if you know where the sto­ry is head­ing, the end­ing hits hard as the painful extent of Jackson’s suf­fer­ing is revealed. Suf­fice to say that alco­holism is a dis­ease which can be con­trolled but nev­er ful­ly cured.

Giv­en that the orig­i­nal sound­track (much of which was writ­ten by Gaga and per­formed live at var­i­ous are­nas and fes­ti­vals, includ­ing Coachel­la and Glas­ton­bury) con­tains some catchy tunes but no cast-iron ear­worms, it’s the hon­est, non-judg­men­tal dis­cus­sion of men­tal health – specif­i­cal­ly addic­tion and depen­den­cy – that will stay with you. That, the stand­out sup­port of Dave Chap­pelle, Sam Elliott and Andrew Dice Clay, and the sur­pris­ing real­i­sa­tion that Coop­er the direc­tor may just have cut his first major hit.