A Star Is Fine

I saw A Star Is Born last night, and I'm here to report that it's fine.

The far advance buzz was that this movie was going to be a disaster. I had also read that Lady Gaga was awful in the movie (this from a particularly hateful set of blind items that I read all the time because I am a crazy person). I was pretty prepared for the movie to be really bad (and I expected to skip it entirely) until last month when Star started playing at festivals and everybody – including the critic from Vanity Fair – said it was great. Everyone seemed to love this movie, and everyone started saying it was going to win Best Picture, that Gaga and Bradley Cooper were shoo-ins for Oscar nominations, that the whole thing was incredible and fresh and great.

A Star Is Born is not all of those things, but it is good. Cooper (who directed!) is using a slightly re-written version of the 1976 Barbra Streisand–Kris Kristofferson film. (The 1954 Judy Garland–James Mason film is a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor–Fredric March movie. The first two are set in Hollywood; the more recent two are set in the music industry.)

The music is great in this film, and it is shot well. It is also filled with some excellent supporting performances from Anthony Ramos, Ron Rifkin, Dave Chappelle, and especially Sam Elliott. (And a small dose of fabulousness from Shangela – the real winner of RPDR All Stars 3, but that's another story.)

Bradley Cooper is, honestly, brilliant in the film, and because he is such an excellent actor, the film succeeds in many ways. He is open and available to the camera, even when he is playing drunk or closing off from the other characters. One feels one has access to him. He is truly superb in this, and his small gestures, gravelly voice, and bad habits all feel lived in, fiercely inhabited. He's just great – a perfect, grounding, "authentic" foil for the high theatrics of Lady Gaga's personality.

Gaga brings with her enormous baggage, of course. She has been a huge pop star, and she is also a fashion icon at this point. So her appearance in the movie is weighted down by this. How do you play this young woman as a kind of authentic, honest person who loses her way, when the person we know from the television is already this outsized, over-the-top star? Cooper mostly does a good job of dealing with these problems, but once Gaga's character becomes a famous pop star, it felt impossible to me that she had never been one. The whole thing feels so tiresomely inevitable. Her voice is excellent, and she powers through some great original songs that all work to great effect. These are the movie's best moments, I think – the moments when I was totally on the movie's side. When Gaga's singing, A Star Is Born is doing great.

The rest of the Gaga performance is almost non-existent. Honestly, it looks to me like they've edited around what was probably a fairly stilted or over-the-top performance. If you look carefully, you'll notice that the movie focuses much more on Cooper's character than it should. In many ways, Gaga's character disappears for sections of the movie. This is fine, because Cooper is so damn good, but the movie's simply not about Gaga's character. And this seems to me like a corner into which the director was backed by a performance that didn't quite work. There are, for example, no typical fight scenes between the two. She never really lays into him at any point. In most of her big emotional scenes Gaga cries quietly while looking at another actor. And she has no monologue in which she deals with what happens at the film's end (the usual Oscar-bait scene). Instead, the film's emotional payoff arrives with a speech from Sam Elliott and then a song from Gaga. As I said, the songs are great, and she does a great job connecting us emotionally through music, but I think she should thank the film's editor for her performance.

A Star Is Born is good, but more than anything else the whole thing just feels sort of tired, like the movie's main character – who spends much of the film trying to escape, drinking too much, and passing out – or like a movie that's been remade three times since 1937. Everything in A Star Is Born is cliché, and this, of course, is because it has had time in the last 80 years to cement itself as a cliché. All its plot twists are expected, all its emotions familiar. In other words, it's not that Cooper's film isn't good. It is. It's just that the whole thing felt a little empty to me – as though we were all going through the motions, audience included. There's this moment in act two when Gaga's manager looks over and says "You've been nominated for three Grammys including best new artist" when I thought Well that came out of nowhere and then thought Of course she got nominated for three Grammys. Everything that happens in this film felt contrived to me. It's a fairly well done bit of business, and it has a superb central performance, but it's just business as usual.