Lady Gaga in A Star is Born 
 
 Lady Gaga makes her feature film debut in Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star is Born. Ahead of the film’s October 5th release, the first trailer has arrived and you can watch it below. 
 
 In addition to directing the film, Cooper co-stars alongside Gaga. He plays a season musician named Jack Maine, who discovers and falls in love with a struggling musician named Ally (played by Gaga). “She has just about given up on her dream to make it big as a singer until Jack coaxes her into the spotlight,” reads a plot synopsis. “But even as Ally’s career takes off, the personal side of their relationship is breaking down, as Jack fights an ongoing battle with his own internal demons,” 
 
 The film also stars Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Elliott, and Dave Chappelle. 
 
 As previewed in the trailer, the film features original music which Gaga wrote with Cooper and a handful of other musicians, including Lukas Nelson, Jason Isbell, and Mark Ronson. All of the music is original and was recorded live. ||||| Lady Gaga is ready for her big screen debut! 
 
 The musician stars alongside Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born — a remake of the 1976 film starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Gaga plays an aspiring singer whose career begins to take off after she meets Cooper’s washed up country singer Jackson Maine. 
 
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 The first trailer offers a hint of the drama to come in the film, but mainly focuses on how Cooper and Gaga’s characters meet and her reluctance to want to be on stage. 
 
 “I don’t sing my own songs. I just don’t feel comfortable,” Gaga tells Cooper. “Almost every single person has told me they like the way I sounded but they didn’t like the way I look.” 
 
 When Cooper replies by telling her “I think you’re beautiful,” the trailer shows them falling in love and Cooper eventually encouraging Gaga to overcome her fears of performing. 
 
 The movie also marks Cooper’s directorial debut and features the actor singing live. A portion of the film was shot during Coachella in 2017. 
 
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 “It all came down to this broken love story, and there’s no better way to express that than through singing because there’s nowhere to hide when you’re singing. Your whole body is electrified,” Cooper told Entertainment Weekly of the film in December. “That was the initial igniter of the passion for me.” 
 
 A Star Is Born opens October 5. ||||| Published on Jun 6, 2018 
 
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 https://www.instagram.com/starisbornm... “A Star is Born” stars four-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper (“American Sniper,” “American Hustle,” “Silver Linings Playbook”) and multiple award-winning, Oscar-nominated music superstar Lady Gaga, in her first leading role in a major motion picture. Cooper helms the drama, marking his directorial debut. 
 
 
 
 In this new take on the tragic love story, he plays seasoned musician Jackson Maine, who discovers—and falls in love with—struggling artist Ally (Gaga). She has just about given up on her dream to make it big as a singer... until Jack coaxes her into the spotlight. But even as Ally’s career takes off, the personal side of their relationship is breaking down, as Jack fights an ongoing battle with his own internal demons. 
 
 
 
 The cast of “A Star is Born” also includes Andrew Dice Clay, with Dave Chappelle and Sam Elliott. 
 
 
 
 In addition to playing Ally, Gaga, who earned her Oscar nod for the song “Til It Happens to You” from “The Hunting Ground,” performs original songs in the film, which she wrote with Cooper and a handful of artists, including Lukas Nelson, Jason Isbell and Mark Ronson. All the music is original and was recorded live. 
 
 
 
 “A Star is Born” is produced by Bill Gerber, Jon Peters, Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips and Lynette Howell Taylor. Ravi Mehta, Basil Iwanyk, Niija Kuykendall, Sue Kroll, Michael Rapino and Heather Parry serve as executive producers. The screenplay is by Eric Roth and Bradley Cooper & Will Fetters. 
 
 
 
 Collaborating with Cooper behind the scenes are Oscar-nominated director of photography Matthew Libatique (“Black Swan”), production designer Karen Murphy, three-time Oscar-nominated editor Jay Cassidy (“American Hustle,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Into the Wild”), and costume designer Erin Benach. 
 
 
 
 Warner Bros. Pictures Presents, in Association with Live Nation Productions, in Association with Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, A Jon Peters/Bill Gerber/Joint Effort Production, “A Star is Born.” Slated for release on October 5, 2018, the film will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company. It is rated R. ||||| “It’s the same story, told over and over — forever.” When Jackson Maine, the washed-up rock star played by Bradley Cooper, says that toward the end of the new “A Star Is Born,” you may be forgiven a bit of whiplash. He’s talking about music, the 12 notes in an octave that can be endlessly recombined to find something new. But he could be speaking for the film itself, the fourth (at least) version of a show-business fable that’s as unkillable as it’s oft-told. 
 
 And often very well told, including here. If the 1937 and 1954 versions of “A Star Is Born” remain strong and true, and the 1976 Barbra Streisand remake is an effective artifact of its era — and 1932’s “What Price Hollywood?” still stands as a sassy, edgy forerunner — the latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. 
 
 Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan. And it has Cooper both in front of the camera as a growling, insecure ruin of a celebrity and behind it with unexpected first-time assurance. The opening 45 minutes of “A Star Is Born” are as good as mainstream moviemaking gets in the 21st century, and the rest is only slightly less impressive for being so familiar. We’re perfectly willing to come to a story we’ve heard before as long as its emotions can be made convincingly fresh. That’s what happens here. 
 
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 Which is to say that my heart stopped and yours may, too, when Lady Gaga’s Ally — a waitress and wannabe singer with a fair-sized nose and an outsized voice — turns to the camera in close-up while singing “La Vie en Rose” at a drag bar. She looks Jackson and us square in the eyes, and in those few seconds a movie star is born, and so is a director. One reason “A Star Is Born” has worked and still works is that it often casts an actress whose story — the rise, the talent, the chutzpah — echoes the character’s. As with Judy Garland and Streisand, so with Stefani Germanotta/Lady Gaga, who’s most appealing at her most down-to-earth. The role of Ally is so meta as to cast doubt on whether Lady Gaga can play other kinds of parts; the performance is so galvanizing that you don’t remotely care. 
 
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 After Ally meets Jackson, who has wandered into the drag club in an alcoholic haze after headlining an arena show, the movie slows time for an intimate getting-to-know-you session that stretches into the wee hours and the parking lot of an all-night supermarket. The sequence is intensely charming because Cooper the director keeps the camera close and because Cooper the actor and Gaga the costar reveal layers of hurt, longing, insecurity, and ambition. Plus, they’re just hot together, which matters. 
 
 Jackson will soon spirit Ally on his private jet to his next gig, along with her best pal, Ramon (Anthony Ramos), and allow her to share the stage and sing “The Shallow,” her self-penned song that he has thoughtfully and in record time arranged for a full band. That she joins him in improvising complex but perfectly harmonized choruses on the spot is a nod to the absurd movie magic we crave in our origin myths. That the scene works, to hair-raising effect, is strictly due to the stars and the filmmaking, which includes Matthew Libatique’s pungent cinematography and the brilliantly choreographed editing of Jay Cassidy. 
 
 “A Star Is Born” shifts into a baggy and comfortably formulaic gear only when the romance is established and Ally begins her climb to the top. In a movie that occasionally bears down too heavily on visual forebodings (that billboard with the nooses) and timeworn plotting, we know we’ve found our villain with the arrival of Rex (Rafi Gavron), a young, stridently hip record producer. It is he who will make Ally over into a Top 40 pop tart, complete with backup dancers and orange hair; it is he who shows no sympathy as the sozzled Jackson gives in to his demons and begins the long slide down. 
 
 If there’s a flaw in this “Star,” it’s that it’s never clear what the movie thinks of Ally’s transformation. Jackson Maine is a little bit country, a little bit Skynyrd, a little bit Eddie Vedder, maybe some Neil Young on crunchy rawk guitar — he’s his own genre, really, but one that looks back to a shared rock past of many moviegoers. His signature song has a chorus that runs “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die,” but you can tell he’s ambivalent. 
 
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 Ally starts out belting her songs solo on a piano a la Carole King (whose “Tapestry” album cover is tacked to her bedroom wall), but she rapidly ascends to the style and success of an Adele, a Katy Perry, a Sia — or a Lady Gaga. We see that rise through the distrusting eyes of her new husband, but whether we’re meant to share his disapproval is left murky, perhaps for fear of pulling the rug out from under his costar and souring sales of the soundtrack album. “A Star Is Born” has an eye to more than one audience. It seems a little nervous they might cancel each other out. 
 
 Yet that sourness and uncertainty is there, given voice by the worried and supportive men surrounding Jackson, including a much older brother and tour manager, Bobby (invaluable Sam Elliott), and a childhood friend and bandmate played by Dave Chappelle, whose cameo shares some clear-eyed wisdom about the difficulties of fame. Ally just has the girls back at the drag bar, who, along with Ramon, largely disappear from the movie; that producer, who’s British (boo) and wears girly socks; and a lovable, egotistical mook of a father (Andrew Dice Clay). “A Star Is Born” lives mostly in Jackson’s world, from whence it peers anxiously out at Ally’s. For these and other reasons, it stands to be an enormous hit. 
 
 Yet the movie manages to have its Top 40 cake and middle-American apple pie, too, and every time Cooper circles back to the central relationship, it feels hushed and honest – a quality this “Star” shares with the 1937 and 1954 versions. Cooper the director nods to the latter with a gorgeously simple opening title sequence (it already feels like a poster) and finds a way to up the ante on Jackson’s humiliation during the awards-ceremony scene, a moment that outdoes every previous “Star” for sheer self-immolating awfulness. 
 
 To its credit, the movie never excuses Jackson as anything other than the author of his own misfortunes. But it does dig a little more deeply than before into the intense and ironic loss of self that can come with celebrity, especially in the age of 24-7 selfies and cellphones. Everyone but Jackson Maine knows who Jackson Maine is, and everyone wants a piece of him. “I’m sorry, but I had to,” says a supermarket cashier (Luenell) after snapping a discreet photo of him and Ally during that first evening together. “It’s all right,” mumbles Jackson. “No, it’s not,” snaps Ally. 
 
 That line suggests she has a lot to learn about being famous but also the strength to learn it, and the payoff comes nearly two hours later, with a climactic memorial performance of “I’ll Never Love Again” that will leave you a soggy mess whether you like it or not. “A Star Is Born” pushes the reset button on one of our most primal bedtime stories, the fairy-tale of arrival and the fall that accompanies it, as if there’s always only room for one. It offers no insight whatsoever on the things a star has to do to endure. For that, I guess, there’s “Sunset Blvd.” 
 
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 ★★★½ 
 
 A STAR IS BORN 
 
 Directed by Bradley Cooper. Written by Cooper, Eric Roth, and Will Fetters, based on a story by William Wellman and Robert Carson. Starring Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper. At Boston theaters, Coolidge Corner, West Newton, suburbs. 135 minutes. R (language throughout, some sexuality/nudity, substance abuse). 
 
 Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @tyburr ||||| Lady Gaga has traveled by egg, donned skirt steak and taken part in a TV blood orgy. But her biggest transformation occurs in the new film “A Star Is Born.” In it, she becomes an Oscar-worthy actress. 
 
 Taking on the classic part of a talented unknown who rises to music superstardom — the iconic role that Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand played before her — Gaga proves her acting chops by trading in flash for humanity. 
 
 You won’t believe she’s the same person who once sang the lyric “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.” And you will be downright shocked that this electrifying film is the third remake of “A Star Is Born.” 
 
 The previous rehash of the 1937 original was the chintzy, critically loathed 1976 version starring a soupy Streisand. Garland and Gaynor’s earlier turns are classic, but oversized by today’s standards. 
 
 Gaga, however, shows brilliant restraint. And for Mother Monster, subtlety is a huge achievement. 
 
 She plays Ally, a waitress at a high-end restaurant who hates her job and is frustrated with her stagnant life. Ally’s passion is singing, which she gets to do at a local drag bar at night. 
 
 During one fortuitous set, famous rocker Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) stumbles in drunk. On the hunt for another bottle, he ends up transfixed by Ally’s rendition of “La Vie En Rose” and the pair stay up all night, flirting. 
 
 Jackson flies her out to his concert the next day and she unexpectedly croons an original song with him onstage. The moment becomes a viral YouTube sensation and a whirlwind romance begins, propelled by a true love of their art, but scarred by easy access to booze and hard drugs. Ally is caught in a bad romance as Jackson succumbs to addiction. 
 
 The stripped-down, makeup-free Gaga has chemistry with the equally unrecognizable Cooper. The actor is perfectly charming, and tortured, as Jackson — the affable sort of musician who could always use a shower. Jackson struggles as Ally ascends, and the disintegration of their once-innocent relationship is devastating to watch. Bring the tissues. 
 
 Cooper’s voice is strong, too, and you believe that a few million people might actually buy this guy’s CD. He and Gaga sing many original numbers written for the film. They range from soothing barstool ballads to clubby pop tunes, but are united by their genuine feel. They don’t sound like movie music. 
 
 “A Star Is Born” also marks Cooper’s first movie as director. Virgin filmmakers tend to either overdo it with weird techniques or go textbook basic. But Cooper delivers his gutsy style with the confidence of a veteran, juxtaposing high-octane, quick-cut concerts with long, pale shots of the couple’s home life. 
 
 Most thrilling are the stage sequences. Cooper often films Ally’s thousands of screaming fans from her point of view — putting us in her lucky shoes for a minute. 
 
 It’s that feeling of exhilaration that makes “A Star Is Born” the best film of the year so far.
– The first trailer for the latest remake of Hollywood classic A Star Is Born, starring Lady Gaga as the singer discovered by Bradley Cooper's fading country music star, was released Wednesday and the internet approves. Twitter was going nuts for the trailer—Katy Perry, for example, simply tweeted, "IM SCREAMINGOSBEJRMF$&2@!K." Media outlets are calling Gaga "unrecognizable" in the trailer; the New York Times went with the headline, "Yes, That Really Is Lady Gaga in the Trailer for A Star Is Born." The film, out Oct. 5, is Gaga's feature film debut and Cooper's directorial debut, Consequence of Sound reports. The soundtrack features all original music written by Gaga alongside Cooper and other musicians including Lukas Nelson, Jason Isbell, and Mark Ronson.