The title doesn't quite fit

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2018)

I haven't seen any other versions and had only a vague idea about the story. But it was pretty obvious from the beginning where things were going, making for a rather depressing watch. More so as I found the title kind of misleading. It's not really a story about a star being born. It's the opposite. It's much more about Jack (Bradley Cooper) than it is about Ally (Lady Gaga). His character is the one with a back story and motivations and surprise revelations. Hers never quite gets developed. It didn't help that her initial rise seemed so improbable it felt inauthentic. Her club performance was appropriately amateur and awkward. Then suddenly she is on a huge stage in front of thousands of strangers and she is perfectly fine. Of course, you could say that at the club she was pretending to be someone else while in those performances she was singing her own songs in her own voice and language with her own hair and face. But still, to deliver a flawless duet without so much as a soundcheck, never mind a rehearsal - that's stuff out of fairy tales and this is decidedly not a fairy tale.
The movie still works thanks to two ingredients - impeccable acting across the board and the songs. More than anything, the lyrics that vividly express the characters' feelings - something that if spoken, would have sounded cheesy. There's also a wonderful symbolism in the way a song about leaving the shallow and going for the deep becomes "Shallow" towards the end. I just wish the movie didn't pop to the surface the moment the music would stop playing. I get it that perhaps they didn't want to ruin the poetry by spelling it out, but I wish they found a way to infuse the rest of the movie with more of the depth that was there in the songs.
And on a shallow note, I wish they washed Bradley Cooper's hair. It looked gross even when he wasn't supposed to be a dirty mess.