I couldn’t see a world where he headlines Coachella and Glastonbury. I couldn’t place Jackson in time in my head. I also believe in the music of A Star Is Born, and I didn’t think I would at first pass, wincing at the grungy ramble of Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine, a grizzled but muscular composite of Kristofferson’s John Howard, tenured alt-rock stadium gods like Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, and latter-day Gregg Allman, whose battle with addiction in the ’90s feels like the Ur-text for this version. I believe in the doting dad who’ll never let you forget the time Paul Anka paid a compliment to his singing. (I’ve seen it!) I believe in the kitchen clerk with the gobsmacking voice, the Yes tee, and the Carole King Tapestry LP hanging on her bedroom wall. drunk stumbling into a gay bar because it’s the only thing open serving alcohol and being paralyzed by great karaoke. It’s part One Crazy Night and part Greek tragedy, a little bit country, and a little bit EDM. Cooper and Lady Gaga’s Star works because it’s charming and realistic in its staging, acting, and music. As believable as Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson are as a couple in the quiet moments of Frank Pierson’s 1976 iteration, barroom brawls and pistols fired at helicopters give certain sections the tone of a Charles Bronson film. As much of a joy as Judy Garland is in George Cukor’s 1954 adaptation, it never seems smart for her to pour so much time into James Mason’s bullish Norman Maine. It treats its female lead like a hunk of iron ore, something that needs to be manipulated and refined by a professional to tease out its inner strength.īradley Cooper’s latest incarnation, the film’s fourth, is one of the best because it works hard to make you like the characters, to make you believe they like each other, and then to show you why you never should’ve trusted it with your feelings to begin with. The destruction of the male lead is mechanical in its effectiveness. The story of A Star Is Born abides because it is familiar. You make sacrifices to get to a better station in life. It’s poetic that A Star Is Born, the enduring tragedy of the Maines, a Hollywood power couple whose fame dynamic grows catastrophically unbalanced, has built its titular star time and again under a pall of collapse and decay. They begin as tiny reactions in the midst of clouds of dust and gas in space, condensing and bonding over hundreds of thousands of years until the collected heat and mass result in nuclear fusion. Real stars, the astrophysical ones, are born through a lengthy process of collapse.

A star is born soundtrack