Wow. I really wanted to love this movie. Bradley Cooper’s debut directorial performance was so close to perfect and yet so far away at the same time. I admire his vision and ambition for this movie so much that I want to credit it even in the areas it struggled with. Watching it through the lens of a moviegoer looking for an escape rather than that of a wannabe movie critic would have allowed me to see past some of its many errors. Ultimately, however, this film was far too flawed to be a legitimate contender for Best Picture or Best Director, despite what many seem to be already predicting. I will touch on all of the good and all of the bad in what will be one of my more thorough reviews.

From a personal standpoint, this movie will stick with me for a long time, and it will be a movie that I purchase on DVD in the future. It’s a movie that I will continue to admire for decades to come. It is also a movie that I will continue to have those “What If” questions about. The difference between A Star Is Born and many other movies I have “What If” questions about is that I don’t necessarily have a band-aid fix on what Cooper could have done to improve his film. Instead, I have some general thoughts and ideas. But these thoughts and ideas are easier said than done, and I completely understand that. Oh, and this review is full of spoilers without warning. So, I’d like to let you know that this is your warning as you read my review.

Before I get into the formal review of A Star Is Born, I first want to mention that Bradley Cooper is an absolute gem of an actor. Specifically, I want to say how he capitalized on commercial opportunities early in his career to more aptly pick and choose the roles once he had become a Hollywood A-lister and a household name. Furthermore, I want to write about how he has frequently taken on demanding roles involving characters with mental health issues (issues that are near and dear to my heart) and turned these roles into Oscar-nominated performances. The most notable of these performances would be his portrayal of Chris Kyle, the most decorated sharpshooter in US history, in the Oscar-nominated American Sniper. This was Bradley’s third Oscar-nominated performance in three years (a feat recorded by just a handful of other actors) and the one that (probably) was the closest he came to winning. He bore his soul as a man haunted by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), struggling to come to terms with the men he killed defending his country while trying to acclimate himself back home with his family.

Then there was Silver Linings Playbook. Here, Cooper played a bipolar character who was equally enchanting and volatile. At the start of the movie, he had just been released from a psychiatric hospital after an 8-month sting for assaulting his wife’s lover. As a result, he gives due diligence to both the manic and depressive mood swings experienced by someone with this diagnosis. And while widely hailed as a comedy, this is often anything but. And through its wide commercial success, it drew a much-needed awareness to Bipolar Disorder. Similarly, his portrayal of author Eddie Morra in the 2011 film Limitless showed a different side of Bipolar Disorder. Where we saw anger, rage, and inability to control urges in Silver Linings Playbook, Cooper portrayed the depressive side of his Limitless character with a sense of shame and self-loathing that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy only to be countered by the frenzied flight into feelings of entitlement and control moments later.

Why do I mention these movies here? First, mental illness and mental wellness are both so critical to talk openly about in society. So it makes me happy when we get an actor in Cooper’s presence who seems to seek out these roles and give them the type of performance each deserves. But also because we get another performance of that magnitude in A Star is Born. And for me, this was the number one highlight of a movie with many highlights. I admit I did not know what I was in for when I stepped into the theater. I know that Lady Gaga’s Ally was an unknown talent discovered by Jackson and that the two formed a relationship while she ascended the charts. Little did I know that with Ally’s rise would come Jackson’s descent.

I will return to the good, but let me discuss some of the film’s problems. This fourth iteration of this movie (1937, 1954, and 1976 being the others) is its darkest version. Many viewers have either seen one or more of the previous versions of it or at least know its story. If I am correct with that assertion, it assumes too much. I had seen one of the other films and knew little about the story. So 45 minutes later, when I finally realize that Bobby (Sam Elliot – The Hero, Tombstone) is Jackson’s brother, I criticized Cooper for not making this more obvious earlier. I know that Jackson did say he had a much older brother, and, heck, he probably even said Bobby by name, but I thought Bobby was his manager and that his brother was someplace far away, perhaps even dead. As a result, like many others, this relationship and storyline never felt like it took full fruition for me. Their lack of chemistry and the 30-year age gap made this feel like a storyline that could have been omitted altogether. I understand someone else besides Ally needed to be meaningful in Jackson’s life. I know that the last line shared between these two means was deeply poignant, but, as a whole, the Jackson/Bobby relationship was a massive miss in this movie. A Star is Born needed Sam Elliot’s voice for Jackson to mimic more than his physical presence.

The film’s timeline was more important than this misuse and unneeded relationship. More often than not, I couldn’t tell if the time between scenes was a day, a week, or a month. This hurt the continuity of the film. And because we couldn’t truly understand the timeline, it was even more challenging to justify actions and reactions. It seemed like everything was accelerating too quickly. While I understand the film was called A Star is Born and not A Mediocre Talent Slowly Rises, it was still difficult for me to believe that this woman, discovered at a local drag bar, could suddenly have a hit album, be the guest performer on Saturday Night Live, and nominated for three Grammy awards in what was two hours for the moviegoer was a bit much.  I say that because this movie is a drama. I could understand if it were a comedy or even a pure musical. But we need time to build the drama. We need time to build a relationship. We need time for reflection on events gone right and events gone wrong. We didn’t have that here. At all. And I hate to say this about a movie I liked, appreciated, and respected as much as I did, but at times, it bordered on comical about everything we were supposed to process in such a short period. I felt like Cooper took added and subtracted theatric elements on a whim. And again, this goes back to both his inexperience and his ambition. I can’t fault the man for either. This was a laborious film. I asked myself a couple of times if it should have been a mini-series so that events would have had more time to evolve. But I dismissed those thoughts as quickly as I entered my brain. This absolutely needed to be on the big screen.

This all goes back to my first paragraph. I can often answer “What If” questions with my own suggestions. But I didn’t have any suggestions for those questions in this film. A novice director hired the perfect leads in himself and newcomer Lady Gaga. He set into motion a story that we’ve seen before, which at its roots was a relatively formulaic story of a star leading man meets an aspiring but undiscovered leading woman, man falls for woman quickly, man smites woman, man has his dark side, woman has dreams that won’t deter her, something has to give. However, this all happened way too quickly. Lady Gaga was incredible and might get an Oscar nomination for her performance. If she does, it will be more for her singing than acting. She belted out some chords as only she could do, mesmerizing the audience every single time. But she was outmatched by Cooper’s mastery of cinematic acting. And she was limited by the script, much more so than he was. I don’t want to say that Jackson’s story took away from Ally’s, but it was tough to tell both simultaneously.

Let’s look at two other movies that revolved around the successes and failures of American musicians. Take Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Whitherspoon in Walk the Line. You clearly had a lead, as well as a supporter. You got a lot from each story because you knew his story was the story, and hers was a supporting one in Jeff Bridges and Collin Farrell in Crazy Heart. Creating a script and developing a flow for those movies seemed easier than for A Star Is Born. This was a consideration before the idea of a third remake was even brought up. Many wondered if a first-time director could handle the elements of this movie. Cooper did, but not with the mastery that other seasoned directors like Clint Eastwood, Damien Chazelle, or Tom Hooper could have.