
With a wholly organic and real-feeling performance, Gaga again engages in the blur between person and persona that she's toyed with for much of her iconographic career thus far.Įven though Gaga’s performance caps a decade-long run of shapeshifting pop stardom, there’s nothing in the apparently modern-day A Star Is Born that really reflects the actual 2010s pop landscape. When the curtain rises on A Star Is Born, she's covering Edith Piaf with fake eyebrows taped on her face two hours later, she's a full-blown pop star, complete with backup dancers and split-second costume changes. Since the aggressive blare of 2013's ARTPOP, Gaga has moved further away with every career turn from the brand of pop that put her on the map circa her 2008 debut The Fame she took up crooning alongside Tony Bennett for 2014's Cheek to Cheek and hopped in the studio with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Father John Misty for 2016's Joanne. But alongside powerful turns from Cooper and Sam Elliott, Gaga shines brightest with an empathetic performance that presents a summation-in-reverse of the last several years of her career. The immersive and romantic narrative of singer-songwriter Ally (Gaga) and her relationship with veteran rocker Jackson Maine (Cooper) as the latter watches the former rocket to pop stardom is imbued with the sort of rockism that typically triggers derision in the current cultural climate. Selznick's 1937 film has been in development for most of the decade and at one point counted Clint Eastwood as its director with, impossibly, Beyoncé in the lead role that Lady Gaga now occupies. Directed by Bradley Cooper, the third remake of David O.


A Star Is Born has no right to be as good as it is.
