Perhaps too shaggy and depressing for me to be completely in love with it, but this is a much better debut film than you would ever expect from Bradley Cooper. There's a drunken naturalism that harks back to John Cassavetes' films. The form matches Jackson Maine's inebriated state with hand-held (but often quite beautiful; praise to Aronofsky's DP Matthew Libatique) camerawork and editing meant to juice tank your sense of space and time.
Mostly this lives or dies on the chemistry between Bradley Cooper and Gaga, which is here in spades. Cooper -unsurprisingly since he's an actor- gets really strong performances out of Sam Elliott, Dave Chappelle, and (no kidding) Andrew Dice Clay.
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