I used to joke that we should start a crowdfunding site where if we raised enough money, we could pay two celebrities to have sex. The site would be called “F*ckstarter.” I mention this because A Star Is Born is basically “Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga: Unlikely F*ckstarter.” It’s a fantasy relationship, between two people we never knew we wanted to see together, but find we suddenly need, desperately.
Bradley Cooper plays Jackson Maine, some kind of a country-fried rock star who discovers Ally (Gaga) singing so well at a drag bar that she brings him to tears. Lady Gaga, made up as a man made up as a woman, singing a French song for drag queens — it’s kind of perfect. Jackson, a wobbly but good-natured drunk who prefers gin on the rocks, decides he has to meet her, and the courtship is on.
The courtship consists largely of Jackson making overtures that would be over-familiar if he wasn’t simultaneously making her feel safe, while Ally gradually allows herself to be vulnerable. Even his drunkenness, which usually makes a man seem erratic or unpredictable (ie, more dangerous), in his case seems to make him feel safer, too tottering to trap her anywhere. Of course, it helps that he’s famous. His unconventionally erotic gestures include: removing her stuck-on eyebrows and licking her fingers to help her remove her rings. They also sing impromptu songs to each other, which you won’t entirely buy but probably won’t care.
Throughout, Cooper and his DP, Matthew Libatique, have two incredibly effective shots that they use over and over. One is an erotic, over the shoulder shot that captures the gleam of anticipation in the flirtee’s eye, evoking the excitement, tension, suspense of looking for/waiting for that first kiss. Relationships rarely get more thrilling and scary than that initial consummation, that confirmation of mutual attraction. It’s like G-rated POV porn, and weirdly more exciting that way.
The other shot is a variation on the old Spielberg face, a slow push in or hold on one character staring in awe at another while they sing, touched to the core by the power of the music. It’s like sweetening the audio, kind of a trick, but it works, especially helpful in a movie that’s essentially a musical, with music as a metaphor for sex. When the drag queens hassle Jackson into singing for them, he asks what he should sing, and a drag queen says “Whatever you want, honey, as long as you look at me while doing it.”
It’s basically the filmmakers acknowledging their own trick. Yes, we see what you did there, and we like it.
Lady Gaga, meanwhile, is Lady Gaga, a glib observation that’s also true. The casting did most of the work here. There’s a bit of a Jiminy Cricket effect with her, making one of our most outlandish performers play mousy and shy — sing you a song? oh no, I couldn’t possibly… — so that it seems even more cathartic and incongruous when that arena-shaking voice comes out. She’s surprisingly competent in that role of shy girl lets loose, or maybe not surprising, since Lady Gaga is basically the aspirational ideal of every theater kid. Act? Of course she can act. She went to Tisch, because of course she did.
Cooper performs the whole movie in this flat-mouthed Texas drawl that seems a bit much at first, until his brother, played by Sam Elliott (Sam Elliott! Who doesn’t get excited every time they see Sam Elliott?) shows up and asks “Why’d you steal my voice?”
Ah, that explains it. He was doing Sam Elliott.
Cooper has also created a kind of rescue dog farm for aging comedians — oh no, you’re not washed up, you’re just going to live on Bradley Cooper’s big farm upstate! Andrew Dice Clay plays Ally’s father, a Sinatra-obsessed limo driver who’s right in Dice’s Italian-face wheelhouse (Dice is actually Jewish, though Lady Gaga is Italian). He’s always been an actor, even when he was a comedian. There’s also an extended cameo by Dave Chappelle, the formerly frail live wire who’s so effective here as a grizzled, strangely jacked sage that it creates almost the same kind of incongruity as Gaga’s voice. Eddie Griffin even shows up for a small speaking role. Eddie Griffin! Damn you, Bradley Cooper, how do you always know exactly what I want before I do?
Cooper and his co-writers, Eric Roth and Will Fetters, aren’t doing anything especially groundbreaking here (nor would you really expect them to in a movie that’s being remade for the fifth time), but they’ve managed to brilliantly combine the appeal of Behind the Music, an Oscar-bait music biopic, rom-coms, musical theater, and that first Susan Boyle video. They’re not telling their story so much as giving us all the things we already like in order to get us off. Like I said: it’s porn. And hey, who doesn’t like porn?
Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More of his reviews can be found here.
