‘Having something to say is one thing; having a way to make people listen is a whole other bag.” This is what an awestruck Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) tells fledgling singer-songwriter Ally, played by Lady Gaga, in the newest and shiniest remake of A Star Is Born. Premiering last month at Venice film festival to rave reviews – and early Oscars buzz for both Cooper and Gaga – it is, as Variety’s Owen Gleiberman put it, “a transcendent Hollywood movie”. As far as pop music is concerned, the messenger matters.
Like the traditional Hollywood musical, pop star movies follow the familiar arc of an artist finding their voice – and, best of all, feature real pop stars. As a pop music superfan who struggles with musicals and the tiresome way they crowbar narrative into song and dance numbers, I’m obsessed with this movie subgenre. They’re fascinating as vehicles for stardom – and revealing about the kind of icons the pop stars turned actors want to be associated with, as well as the legacies they wish to leave themselves (consider Diana Ross as Billie Holiday in 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues, and Beyoncé as a version of Diana Ross in Dreamgirls). In an age of hyperdocumentation, pop stars are more precious than ever about how their star personas are perceived. Yet in the reflection of another’s star image, we can often see them more clearly.
They can be based on real people, like Gregory Nava’s under-appreciated Selena (1997), which featured Jennifer Lopez – now a successful actor in her own right – as the late Tejano music diva Selena Quintanilla, or imagined ones, like Whitney Houston’s Rachel Marron in The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson, 1992), possibly the greatest pop star movie of all time. That film starred Houston at the apex of her fame, making for a metatextual masterpiece that captured her luminosity at its brightest, before it flickered as she declined into drugs.
They can be Oscar success stories, like 2006’s Motown musical Dreamgirls, for which American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson won the award for best supporting actress (her fizzing performance makes co-star Beyoncé look like a half-empty can of flat Coke). They can also be the stuff of Golden Raspberry lore, for example Glitter (2001), a tragically bad, 80s-set box-office flop that features Mariah Carey’s botched cover of Tom Browne’s Funkin’ for Jamaica (NY) on the soundtrack. It saw Carey receive a Razzie for worst actress (probably not helped by the film’s release date, just one week after 9/11).
If you’re lucky, you might get two pop stars in the same movie – 2010’s Burlesque starred Christina Aguilera as a small-town waitress who moves to Los Angeles and winds up singing in a nightclub run by – wait for it – Cher.
Some pop star movies are misunderstood, like the Shonda Rhimes-scripted Crossroads (2002), which followed Britney “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” Spears as she road-tripped in search of her estranged mother, writing songs with strange boys en route.
Others, like 2008’s Cadillac Records, which tried and failed to channel the world-weary soul singer Etta James via a stiff-backed Beyoncé, are simply miscast. Sometimes pop stars are just silver-screen versions of themselves; either played straight, like Eminem’s Detroit rapper on the rise, Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith, in the autobiographical 8 Mile (2002), or as straight parody (the Spice Girls movie, Spice World, an endearingly wacky satire on fame and the free press directly inspired by the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night).
According to Martha Shearer, lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, pop star films “have been a significant component of Hollywood cinema going back to the coming of sound”, with some of the biggest stars of the studio era, like Bing Crosby and Doris Day, making their name as pop singers first. The key turning point, she says, was in the 1980s, when films became increasingly driven by the popularity of their soundtracks. Or, more specifically, two years earlier, in 1978, with Grease.
Based on the 1971 stage musical of the same name, it made use of pop stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, both of whom had enjoyed chart hits (Travolta with Let Her In in 1976, one year before he starred in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever; Newton-John with the singles If Not For You and Banks of the Ohio in 1971). In the US, the soundtracks for both Saturday Night Fever and Grease were the No 1 and No 2 two bestselling albums of the year. It was a watershed moment that signalled an appetite for these kinds of movies and set a precedent for the Grammy-winning soundtrack to The Bodyguard to make history as the first album to sell more than a million copies within a one-week period.
It’s not unfair to expect pop stars to be able to act. “Singers often make fabulous actors… all singing is acting”, writes Stephanie Zacharek in Time’s review of A Star Is Born. And the writer and founder of music website Popjustice, Peter Robinson, says: “Booking an actual singer for the job does a lot of the heavy lifting for a screenwriter or director. You see Gaga and you think of talent, hard work, and a sense that this person deserves to make it because, well, this face you recognise made it in real life.”
Bradley Cooper’s casting of Lady Gaga as an ingénue on the rise is pitch perfect. Stripped of the bells, whistles and wigs that served as a fundamental part of her real star persona, the singer we see on screen is a gooseflesh-inducing volt of electricity. Cooper’s fading country-rock star encounters Gaga’s Ally a drag show in a dive bar – a detail that revels in Gaga’s real coming of age in drag bars on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (the same is true of French pop star Héloïse Letissier, who was reborn as Christine and the Queens in London’s Madame Jojo’s). Masked by dramatic 1930s-style eyebrows and painted red lips, Ally belts out Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose with the commanding, easy confidence of somebody who has performed to a crowd a thousand times before, even finishing with a Flashdance-style dip.
A Carole King poster hangs in Ally’s bedroom, but before long a star-making viral video of Shallow lands her a major label record deal with Interscope (to whom Gaga is signed), and she’s swapping her acoustic guitar for hip-hop choreography to match the manufactured R&B pop assigned to her. Her mousy hair is dyed bright red, not unlike Britney’s in the video for her 2003 single Toxic. Seeing this version of Ally on stage at the Grammy awards doesn’t exactly feel like a suspension of disbelief.
In A Star Is Born’s emotional centrepiece, Ally joins Jackson on stage to sing, and the film invites the audience to forget, for a moment, that they are watching a master of her craft who has spent the best part of 10 years selling out arenas. Yet it’s convincing precisely because Gaga has lived a version of this character. As she said in an interview with Vogue, her “natural state” is “dancing and crying”.
Shearer says that while performance scenes like this can help to create authenticity, the presence of a real pop star can also “exacerbate the tension between narrative and the standalone attraction of musical performance where the narrative seems like a flimsy excuse”. Robinson is similarly sceptical about how A Star Is Born might be received. “I think Gaga’s fanbase will approach that recognition factor quite differently,” he says, explaining that the film might be seen as “a career lifeline for someone whose biggest days as a pop star were the best part of a decade ago”.
Yet the film is less a resuscitation of Gaga’s career than it is a defibrillator to the musical melodrama, a genre that has been sadly dormant since The Bodyguard. Cooper’s A Star Is Born is the fourth retelling of a classic story whose earlier iterations starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March (1937), Judy Garland and James Mason (1954), and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson (1976). For Robinson, there’s irony in Gaga – an artist known for writing her own material – “launching her acting career in a film that’s essentially a cover version of a cover version”. But A Star Is Born cheekily acknowledges its legacy, with Jackson telling Ally that pop music is “the same story told over and over again”.
All the artist can offer the world is how they see it, he says. Indeed, in the film’s closing credits, the woman born Stefani Germanotta is billed as Lady Gaga.
A Star Is Born opens on 3 October
