Boy, did I want 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 have so much admiration for his vision and ambition for this movie that I want to give it credit 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 that I have “What If” questions about is 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 more easily said than done, and I completely understand that. Oh, and this review is full of spoilers without warning. Therefore, let this be your warning as you read my review.

Before I get into the formal review of A Star Is Born, I first want to comment on the absolute gem of an actor that Bradley Cooper is. Specifically, I want to mention how he capitalized on commercial opportunities early in his career to more aptly pick and choose the roles once he has 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 equal parts 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, because mental illness and mental wellness are both so critical to talk openly about in society. So when we get an actor of Cooper’s presence who seems to seek out these roles and give them the type of performance each deserves, it makes me happy. 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 that had a ton of highlights. I admit that I did not know what it was in for when I stepped into the theater. I know that Lady Gaga’s Ally was an unknown talent discovered by Bradley’s 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 get back to the good, but let me talk about some of the film’s problems. This fourth iteration of this movie (1937, 1954, 1976 being the others) is its darkest version. I think it is assumed that viewers have either seen one 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. Honestly, their lack of chemistry, as well as the 30-year gap in ages, made this feel like a storyline that could have been left out altogether. I understand that there needed to be someone else besides Ally who was meaningful in Jackson’s life, and I understand that the last line shared between these two means was deeply poignant, but, as a whole, the Jackson/Bobby relationship was a huge miss in this movie. A Star is Born needed Sam Elliot’s voice for Jackson to mimic more than it needed his physical presence.

More importantly than this misused and, really, the unneeded relationship is the timeline of the film. More often than not, I couldn’t tell if the time between scenes was a day, a week, a month. And this really hurt the continuity of the film. And because we couldn’t truly understand the timeline, it was even more difficult to justify actions and reactions. It all seemed like everything was happening at an accelerated pace, and, truthfully, it was difficult to buy. 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 a two-hour span for the moviegoer was a bit much. And I say that because this movie is a drama. If it were a comedy or even a pure musical, I could understand it. 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 was bordering on comical about all that we were supposed to process in such a short period of time. 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 could be spread out longer. 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. Lots of times, I can answer “What If” questions with my own suggestions. But I didn’t have suggestions for those questions for this film. A novice director hired the right leads in himself and newcomer Lady Gaga. He set into motion a story that we’ve seen before, which at its roots was a fairly formulaic story of star leading man meets aspiring but undiscovered leading woman, man falls for woman quickly, woman is smitten by man, man has his dark side, woman has dreams that won’t deter her, something has to give. But, geez, if this all didn’t happen way too quickly. Lady Gaga was great, and she might get an Oscar nomination for her performance. It will be more for her singing (I think) than her actual acting if she does. She belted out some chords as only she can 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 of these 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, and you clearly had a supporter. You got a lot from each story because you knew his story was the story, and hers was a supporting one. Or Jeff Bridges and Collin Farrell in Crazy Heart. Farrell took a clear backseat. It was easier to create a script and develop a flow for those movies than for A Star Is Born. This was a consideration before the idea of a third remake was even brought up. Questions were asked if a first-time director could handle the elements of this movie. Well…Cooper did, but not with the mastery that other seasoned directors like Clint Eastwood, Damien Chazelle, or Tom Hooper could have.

So there we have the bad…the odd relationship between Jackson and his brother Bobby, the not-so-identifiable timeline and progression of events, and the pauses that we really needed between the highs and lows of various scenes for us better to identify the lead characters emotions and reasons for emotions. At times, it felt like a bunch of one-act scenes rather than one coherent story. And I saw that as constructive criticism because of how much I appreciated the movie.

But the good far exceeds the bad. This movie is likely to earn some Academy Award nominations. Let’s take the sound stuff out of the equation for a second because I’m going to guess it gets nominations for Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Original Song, and probably Score. So if all of the sound nominations are off the table and the movie can only get one nomination, I’d have to give it to Cooper as the actor. His performance as Jackson Maine is right up there with all of his other performances listed in this review, as well as his terrific performances in Burnt, Joy, and American Hustle (his third nomination for Best Actor). He trained hours a day for months to lower his voice two octaves for this role. And it worked. I was completely engrossed in Jackson Maine, often forgetting that I was watching a movie and that the movie starred Bradley Cooper. I’m not ready to call him Tom Hanks or Daniel Day-Lewis yet, but, man, he might not be that far away. He’s a severe alcoholic and drug addict (though it’s odd how he’s able to be clean at certain times so easily). On top of that, he is losing his hearing and refuses pleas from his brother to help himself with that before it gets worse. But it was his addictions that really seemed to fuel his depression before we meet him. And it does just seem later on in the movie. Ally becomes his bright light..kind of how we all can act a little differently in the short term when we become infatuated with somebody. And he has completely fallen for her. And he’s happy for her meteoric rise though he isn’t so fond of her agent or the direction he takes her in. He thinks that adding dancers with her (kind of like P!nk, Britney Spears, or heck Lady Gaga) takes away from the real skill in her voice. And as his drinking and drug use increases, his temperament becomes more erratic and hostility more severe. There is no sugarcoating anything here. This country-rock superstar takes a huge fall from grace. But how? Because why? Yes, he was a drunk, but I don’t understand how he went to selling out shows to being this nothing is such a short period of time. It just happens so darn quickly without any true rhyme or reason that it makes you dream of these two actors having someone with just a little more experience behind the camera.