A Star Is Born has no right to be as good as it is. Directed by Bradley Cooper, the third remake of David O. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
Even 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. For starters, it’s a bit difficult to imagine Maine’s dyed-in-the-wool country-rock playing to such a huge audience at Coachella, as it does in the film’s opening scene; elsewhere, some modern relevance is achieved through a Halsey cameo and a pivotal scene centered around the type of all-star Grammys tribute that typically turns social media into a unanimous airing of grievances. This disconnect from our reality is totally fine: A Star Is Born reaches for and ultimately achieves a timeless vibe that doesn’t require current pop-cultural relevance.
The film’s official soundtrack is similarly old-fashioned in its approach, even as its credits include a host of modern songwriters from the pop, country, and rock spheres. Along with Gaga and Cooper, there’s contributions from Jason Isbell, Willie Nelson’s son Lukas, Mark Ronson, Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt, behind-the-scenes pop wizards Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, the list goes on. The songs fall into a few distinct silos—blaring blues-rockers, tender acoustic ballads, anthemic torch songs, and robotic electro-pop—and save for a digital flourish or two on the pop songs that make up much of the film’s back half, there’s very little here that would’ve sounded out of place on blockbuster film soundtracks of decades past.
