If my calculations are correct, this is the fourth version of this tale to make it to film. This one, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, continues the high bar set by its predecessors. The acting, writing and directing are all superior and the film has an ambience, a watchable quality which makes it hard to turn away from, even in the hard (very very hard) parts to watch. Lady Gaga has received a good deal of praise for her first film role and she is commendable for being very open, very vulnerable, very real. Her work, however, overshadows the fact that Bradley Cooper not only acts in the film but directed and produced it. As an actor he blends into the role far more completely than I have ever seen him. His Jackson Mayne is a walking disaster with a gravelly voice who is constantly high. He is a man who is clearly falling off a cliff in slow motion. I mean, I knew it was Bradley Cooper but I have never seen him like this and had to look twice in the early scenes. The romance guy he often portrays, even as a broken character in "Silver Linings Playbook", is entirely absent here. His love for Abby is not that of a smooth player but an act of a starving man finding water. The love aspect is played well by both actors throughout and is the strong core which holds this destructive path together. While one might ask why rising star Abby sticks around it becomes so undefinable, yet so obvious, in their scenes with one another. Near the end, Jackson's final scene is wordless yet immensely powerful and gripping. I stopped breathing, then I cried for the rest of the film. Shot with the eye of a painter of the everyday, the film somehow strips away the glamour of fame to find the humans beneath. Really compelling and worth an afternoon sob.
