A Star Is Born

I have trust issues with Lady Gaga. When she burst onto the scene, social media was not yet as entrenched as it is today, but she understood that to be a pop star in the 21st century was to manage one’s own brand. She had her gays the way Trump has his base. But, in order to broaden her market share, she always had a fail-safe—machine-made mystification. A “Poker Face” fixates you on the mask to deflect attention from who is wearing it, just as anyone could be “Born This Way.” I would rather “Just Dance.”

To be fair, Gaga seems to have a genuine rapport with her fans—she has emerged from the “Poker Face” closet a full-on Judy Garland impersonator. Gaga officially earns her diva wings by reviving the kitschiest role possible: an Old Hollywood fainting spell that is all the more cheeky for its pretense of being virtuous and straight. The old saw about the altruistic wife whose career eclipses that of the saturnine star husband who exposes her to fame could not have been trotted out at a more receptive time; the story pairs a cultural longing for stable old feels with future-is-female sentimentality.

To be fair, again, I think Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper chose A Star Is Born as their acting and directing debuts, respectively, with (mostly) wistfulness in mind. (It is a strain to look for cultural relevance in a film that has been through development hell.) In these pre-Singularity times, they’ve realized that the human factor—giving it your all—comes at a premium. Their film flips the bird at upstart Instagram celebrities: performance is hard, it says, and these two want to show their work. Talent is two-thirds sweat.

There’s a wide-eyed twinkle to the early courtship scenes; Cooper’s own courtship with David O. Russell is paying dividends. On top of that, there’s tragic weight in the end, as Cooper’s Jackson Maine deteriorates. His skin looks as though it attracts flies, and his slurried words sound caught in a rut. The movie gets right the one thing it needs to: its leads’ chemistry.

But the movie by no means brings the story—which has crawled its way back to the screen three times since the 1937 original and was rehashed as recently as The Artist—up to date. Or makes it in any way plausible. These days, it seems that Jack’s contretemps at the Grammys would more likely renew his career as a viral sensation than crush it with ignominy. (I guess that trick only works if you’re shameless.) And the way Jack drags reticent Ally (Gaga, with a redeeming eye roll) on stage for the first time seems less a romantic gesture than a form of creative extortion. Even the script’s use of “fuckin'” as an all-purpose modifier has camp resonance; nothing gives soap opera a whistle of desert-dry authenticity like Sam Elliott cussin’.

But, for all the helpings of cheesecake about self-sacrifice and suffering artists and the pressures of talent and riches and fame, there’s a real stink of reality—and lived-in accuracy to class—whenever Jack and Ally quarrel and make up. And Gaga, the dance-club obscurantist, is never more “real” than when she openly questions her circumstances: not in the ironic mode of Bill Murray, but with the suspiciousness of a mother hen. She’s always known how to put on a show; now she can do it with the mask off.