A Star Is Born

Bradley Cooper directs this 136 minute film about Jackson Maine, a musician on the way down, and Ally, a singer on the way up, and sets the two curves directly against each other. The songs were recorded live on set, with more than sixty separate audio channels running in the most complex scenes. What reaches the audience is concert footage without studio polish: crowd noise, audible breath, small drifts in pitch. Ears trained on glossy music films may hear that as a flaw, yet it is exactly where the stage energy comes from. Those scenes were shot at real festivals in front of real crowds, on very tight clocks. At Glastonbury the production had a four minute slot inside Kris Kristofferson’s set in front of some eighty thousand people; at Stagecoach the crew had eight minutes to set up and shoot each scene. There is almost no coverage available to smooth things over in the edit. Kristofferson, incidentally, starred in the 1976 version of this story. Cooper worked with a dialect coach four hours a day, five days a week for six months to pull Jackson’s voice toward Sam Elliott’s. Elliott plays the brother, and accuses him on screen of stealing that voice. Not for you if addiction and suicide shown at length are hard to sit with.