Not a bad movie, but immense marketing made it feel... err... Shallow

Rating: 7/10 (18 January 2019)

The trailers are telling us the movie is about a young girl who makes it on stage thanks to a charismatic seasoned singer. Well, that happens after a quarter of the film. The rest is just drama: family drama, marriage drama, substance abuse drama, disease drama, industry drama, death drama. They only had to introduce some mobsters and a rape and they would have checked all the boxes. The marketing exploding out there is telling us that Bradley Cooper has an amazing voice and the Lady Gaga is an amazing actress. They are not bad, but certainly amazing is not how I would go. Lady Gaga has an amazing voice and Bradley Cooper is a great actor, though. So with all this in mind and without knowing this is a remake of a 1937 film that has been remade four times, I felt a little cheated. That is why I will rate it as average, although, objectively, it wasn't.
The story is nice, not exceptional, we've all seen it before, but nice. The actors shine, though. Cooper is great, Sam Elliott plays a sympathetic character that didn't annoy me (for once) and he kind of steals the scene whenever he is in one, Gaga herself was pretty good, in the sense that I don't know if she meant to play it as the natural girl or she was just being herself. It's clear people loved making this film and so it's a pity to see the same corruption of the soul described in the movie happen to the film itself when marketing people get their hands on it.
Bottom line: boy meets girl, they hook up, then the film actually begins.