A Star is Born

He's just Gaga for you

Grade: B

Director: Bradley Cooper

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Dave Chappelle and Andrew Dice Clay

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

A Star is Born is like an old song being covered by new performers. It’s enjoyable to observe different interpretations and nuances being fleshed out, to hear how the piece is re-imagined. But the strictures of the original composition remain, a familiarity that can be both nostalgic and inhibiting.

Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) is an aging, scruffy singer-songwriter whose cling to celebrity is fueled by booze and pills. After a concert, Jack stumbles into a drag bar where Ally (Lady Gaga) is performing a rendition of “La Vie En Rose.” Jack is instantly smitten, and after an all-night charm offensive, Ally becomes smitten, too. There’s genuine chemistry between the two, with the credit going to the actors and Cooper as the film’s director (more on that later).

Jack sweeps Ally off her feet and then onto stage, where she becomes a sudden sensation. The rest of A Star is Born comprises Ally’s shooting star crossing paths with Jack’s fading fame. Save for one raw scene of exasperation and jealousy, Jack and Ally remain hopelessly devoted to each other even as their coupling is ultimately doomed by age and circumstance, a concession to audience wanting a love story that drains dramatic tension from the storyline.

But Cooper the director takes his time, a pace that often grinds the film to a crawl but is nonetheless necessary to allow the characters to develop organically. That’s especially the case with Jack’s complicated relationship with his much older brother Bobby, who is played by Sam Elliott in a performance that deserves all the awards nominations. Indeed, the entire cast is well-served by Cooper’s lens, handheld camerawork that glides and swoops around the actors, capturing the intimate contours of their visages. It becomes a window into the characters’ soul, more revealing than anything in the stodgy story.

The fourth movie iteration of this rags-to-riches parable looks to plumb dramatic depths barely scratched in the previous three editions. By casting its leads as singers, the film instantly skews closer to the 1976 Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand melodrama. But this latest version is more focused on the struggle, nay obsession to both gain notoriety and avoid losing it. It feels like a film à clef at times, including the casting of Andrew Dice Clay (as Ally’s father) and Dave Chappelle (as Jack’s former musician buddy)—Clay’s character believes he could have been as big as Sinatra, while Chappelle’s character is content that he left the fast life behind. As Ally, Lady Gaga is a singer long denied a big break because her nose is too big. Then, once stardom strikes, the talented songwriter finds herself morphed and molded into a sequined pop star. Even here, Ally also never relinquishes her grounding despite Jack’s repeated worries that she’ll lose her way, another concession to Ally’s piety that feels like a concession to the aura of the actress playing her.

A Star is Born only truly comes to life when Gaga and Cooper are on stage. And it’s fun to watch the actors pull the curtain back on themselves and the entertainment industry. But the feeling of “been there, done that” is inescapable.

Country Strong

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Grade: F

Director: Shana Feste

Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim McGraw, Garrett Hedlund, and Leighton Meester

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

One tortuous viewing of Country Strong emphatically solves its mysterious disappearing act during this movie awards season. Once aspiring to be a gender-switching rehash of Crazy Heart, last year’s belle of the Oscar ball, Country Strong is more like a long country song that, instead of warbling about a dog, gun, and pickup truck, manifests itself as a near-literal B-movie: booze, bars, a tour bus, incessant babbling, mascara-stained bawling, and a pet bird named Loretta Lynn.

Fresh out of a stint in alcohol rehab, fallen country star Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow) is thrust back into the limelight of a three-city comeback tour by her husband/manager, James (Tim McGraw). Her opening act is a rising, scruffy singer-songwriter named Beau (Garrett Hedlund), who previously split time playing local honkytonks and working as an orderly at Kelly’s rehab center, where the two also learned to make music between the sheets. Also along for the ride is Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester), an ex-beauty queen-turned-pop tart looking jumpstart her burgeoning country music career.

Country Strong crosses a southern-fried Valley of the Dolls with an unintentional parody as side-splittingly campy as Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. No sooner does James declare that Kelly’s meds shouldn’t be mixed with alcohol than contrivance puts a bottle of Smirnoff in her dressing room. Beau and Chiles’ initial animosity could only mean they’ll eventually end up in bed together. And, so brain-dead is writer-director Shana Feste’s script that it undercuts a poignant slow-dance between James and Kelly by ignoring the fact that it begins with him cutting in on her and a leukemia-stricken boy during a Make-A-Wish visit.

The original songs – performed by the actors themselves – are more forgettable country pop than evocative classic country. Indeed, when a local newspaper declares Chiles and Beau as the next Carrie Underwood and Townes Van Zandt, it is not only quasi-slanderous but hilariously belies everything we’re actually seeing and hearing on screen.

Although Paltrow can carry a tune, she is too old to play a Britney Spears doppelganger and too much the fresh-scrubbed California girl to carry off Kelly’s world-weariness. Hedlund (TRON: Legacy) seems to be channeling Heath Ledger’s drawl in Brokeback Mountain, and Beau’s motives remain as meandering the stitched-together plot. Ironically, McGraw is the only actor that comes close to replicating a realistic character, although even he succumbs to the inane dialogue that cripples this two-hour Hee Haw skit.

Neil Morris