Look, talent comes everywhere. Everybody's talented, fucking everyone in this bar is talented at one thing or another. But having something to say and a way to say it so that people listen to it, that's a whole other bag. And unless you get out and you try to do it, you'll never know. That's just the truth. And there's one reason we're supposed to be here is to say something so people want to hear. Don't you understand what I'm trying to tell you?
I don’t even know how to start this fucking review other than to tell you what a friend of mine said when he saw this film: “hey, Dylan, I saw they finally made a movie out of your first book. You didn’t even push it. What the fuck, man?” To which I had to inform said “friend” that A Star is Born had been made not once, not twice, but this was indeed the fourth incarnation of a very successful story that had been around longer than a century, and in fact was so recycled, you could find elements of it in many different works of fiction and film. Then, to put myself into further Jackson Maine-like depression, I also informed him that my first book was misleadingly called “Humbucker Pickup,” and it had sold just as well as you think an Indie author would sell. To make matters much worse, the film was a huge hit, guaranteeing that i would never fucking see it.
Until tonight when my son came home after discovering Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s song ‘Shallow,’ described it as ‘Bangers,’ and insisted on watching it. So I drank a fifth of Jack, settled down, and informed my son about every fifteen minutes “that’s in chapter 3,” or “that’s in chapter 20” or in one case, “that’s in chapter 15...of the fourth book.” A Star is Born, or ‘Countdown to Rehab’ as the storyline is so non-famously known as, was so good, it made me take my book off Amazon. It’s embarrassing how shite my attempt was at telling such a simple tale. I had six hundred pages and I could not get near what Cooper had in two hours.
The same thing happened when I saw the trailer for Interstellar. ‘FUCK ME,’ I thought. ‘That’s my novel, which I had published that year. I got my ass out of bed on a VERY cold day in Newfoundland to go to the theatre just to make sure it wasn’t too much like my novel ‘Threshold,’ about the scientist who had managed to solve the faster than light travel problem. It was different enough for me to sigh, drink a little, and enjoy the film. I drove home in two feet of snow.
But enough about that dribble. This fourth go is straight on the map. Everything here you’ve seen before, but here it seems to be better. The disappointed family member (mine was a best friend), the trip to rehab (mine was in the South of France), and the public crash (mine was of the Pont Neuf in Paris). In these ways, this story plays our like a thousand stories about movie gods and rock stars. You’ve heard it all before, but you haven’t seen Cooper’s brilliant direction of Lady Gaga, of Sam Elliott, and even of himself. The first hour is an out and out comedy that is uproariously funny and puts you very squarely on the side of the lovers, making the crash that much harder to bear. The crash is cringy, probably more than it needs to be. It’s not so much of a train wreck that you want to watch but more like a homeless man shitting on the sidewalk. You wish you didn’t have to see it. Horrible. Horrible.
And the performances in the last hour designed to pull you through are masterfully crafted by a man who understands not just where to put the camera, but what to do in front of it. I remember him from Alias. I thought he was awesome then, and he’s fucking triple power now. Gaga’s final performance, like most of the songs, was underpowered compared to her performance up to that point, but it boggles the mind what she was able to achieve in what is really her first feature film. Her voice, paired with the humor and Cooper’s crafting of a downward spiral made this far better than any attempt of mine to tell a similar story, even if I thought my characters were better (bias, of course). But, hey, this film was rock and roll.