Bradley Cooper/ Lady Gaga join forces

A Star is Born dazzles before it dwindles.

Lady Gaga displays dazzling showbusiness versatility in A Star is Born, which co-stars Bradley Cooper, who also makes his directorial debut.

Cooper's take on a story that has been told on screen three times before features musical high points from Lady Gaga, who Cooper generously showcases. It's as if Cooper understands that the paying customers want to see Gaga soar or sink and he gives them plenty of room to decide in which direction she's headed.

Displaying talents that evoke images of everyone from Judy Garland to Janis Joplin to Barbra Streisand (of the last version) and maybe even a little Alice Cooper, Lady Gaga -- the erstwhile Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta -- holds the screen, even when her acting proves a bit shaky.

It's difficult to imagine that anyone could be unfamiliar with a narrative arc that's only slightly less shopworn than Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve. Cooper follows the outline of Streisand's 1976 version, kicking the tale into the world of rock and pop stardom. He's sinking. She's rising. Everyone knows the drill.

Cooper plays Jackson Maine, a talented but fading country rocker with a massive alcohol problem. After a concert, Jackson polishes off a bottle in his chauffeured ride. But he's so badly in need of another drink that he stumbles into a drag bar where Lady Gaga's Ally is performing. The only female who's allowed on stage, she delivers a knock-out version of La Vie En Rose.

After her performance, Jackson and Ally spend a night hanging out and Ally confides that her singing career might be stalled because her nose is too big. He says he loves her nose. He recognizes that she has the potential to be a star, a view we readily share because ... well ... she's Lady Gaga.

Interested and smitten, the soft-spoken Jackson pulls Ally into his world, soon sending a private jet to pick her up for one of his concerts.

It doesn't take long for the transformative moment to arise. Jackson pulls Ally on stage. She's nervous, but she kills. And her talent begins to charge his batteries, too. After years of touring drudgery, Jackson seems to be having fun again.

Jackson and Ally work together -- until the point where an ambitious manager (Rafi Gavron) convinces Ally that she can rocket past her musical partner and love interest if she strikes out on her own.

Ally's ascendance parallels Jackson's decline, but when it comes to sinking into an alcoholic swamp, Jackson needs no help. He spirals downward during an overly long decline that reaches its low point when he embarrasses Ally at the Grammys, a scene that's bound to make an audience cringe at Jackson's pathetic degeneration.

To further underscore Jackson's march toward musical irrelevance, he also develops tinnitus, a condition that interferes with his singing and guitar playing.

A bearded, red-faced Cooper keeps his eyes downcast and drops his speaking voice to bass levels. Cooper plays Jackson's smoldering, nonchalant sexiness for all its worth, interrupting a display of cowboy charm with bouts of fall-down drunkenness. He's reasonably convincing doing his own singing.

There isn't much by way of a supporting cast in this Cooper/Gaga duet. Sam Elliott, a reliable symbol of country authenticity with a voice as deep and mellow as a summer afternoon, shows up as Jackson's brother Bobby, the guy who also manages the singer's road tours. The brothers eventually get crosswise and Elliott disappears.

Andrew Dice Clay portrays Ally's father, a failed crooner who wants Ally to achieve the stardom that eluded him.

Dave Chappelle shows up -- more or less out of nowhere -- offering a calming turn as one of Jackson's former buddies; he literally picks Jackson out of the gutter during one of his worst benders.

A Star is Born has a sustained imbalance that may result from its odd match of talents. Cooper is an actor; Lady Gaga is a phenomenon. He's in his actor's world. She's in her pop phenomenon world. It's possible to argue, I suppose, that the clash makes sense for a movie in which Ally's success is destined to eclipse Jackson's.

A Star is Born has entertaining moments to be sure, but there's no star born here. Lady Gaga is a star from the moment we first see her. Cooper's high immersion performance notwithstanding, Lady Gaga remains the movie's main attraction, even when she appears without any of her trademark makeup.

As a director, Cooper likes a funky, handheld camera. During the musical numbers, A Star is Born can feel like an energetic concert film -- albeit one that's interrupted by a story.

If you're up for a pop-cultural fairy tale, A Star is Born probably will get the job done. It struck me as more of a high-wire performance act than a look at two memorable characters. The perils of celebrity and alcoholism and an unlikely romance become supports for Cooper and Lady Gaga to "put it all out there," if you'll excuse some vernacular.

It strikes me that the movie also is about Cooper and Lady Gaga taking turns trying to charm the audience -- him with low-down, shaggy dereliction that screams out for salvage and her with a mixture of daring and talent that defies you not to pay attention.

It's all a bit overamped, an entertainment that's a little too in love with itself to bring down the curtain -- even as its two-hour and 15-minute length begins to wear. And dialogue about the need for authenticity in music didn't convince me that there wasn't a lot more show than substance in Cooper's collection of riffs, tiffs, and musical striving.

Blanchett brilliant in 'Blue Jasmine'

First the simple good news: Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine finds the director in fine form.

Now, a work inspired by figures as disparate as Tennessee Williams and Bernie Madoff seems like an impossible, perhaps even ludicrous, concoction. But in borrowing elements from both reality and drama, Allen has given Blue Jasmine a voice all its own.

The movie also serves as a dazzling showcase for an actress who hardly needs one. Cate Blanchett is brilliant, funny and fiercely scattered as the wife of a fallen Wall Street wheeler-dealer named Hal (Alec Baldwin). Jasmine has hit bottom since her philandering husband was jailed for a massive fraud that prompted the government to seize everything the couple owned.

Mercurial, rueful and sophisticated -- at least when it comes to matters of style -- Blanchett's Jasmine draws on Blanche DuBois from Williams's famed A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she played in New York in 2009 to much acclaim.

Bereft of resources, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco to live with her sister (Sally Hawkins), a divorced woman whose former husband (Andrew Dice Clay) was one of Hal's victims. And, yes, Clay -- someone I had no desire ever to see again -- acquits himself well here. It's an interesting bit of casting.

Like Stella in Williams's play, Hawkins's Ginger is involved with a boisterous and sometimes crude mechanic (a fiery Bobby Cannavale). I'm not entirely sure Cannavale's Chili makes a great deal of sense, but the character doesn't detract, either. The same can be said for Michael Stuhlbarg who shows up as a dentist who hires Jasmine as a receptionist, and then tries to force her into a sexual relationship.

Happily, Allen hasn't attempted an updated replication of Williams's play; he uses Streetcar as a launching pad from which he can examine what happens when the nouveau riche suddenly become the nouveau poor.

Those who prefer Allen with laughs should know that he hasn't stripped the proceedings of humor, but -- at least for me -- there was considerably more pain than hilarity in Jasmine's precipitous decline.

In some ways, Blanchett is the movie. She fills Jasmine with a mixture of disdain and anxiety: This -- Allen seems to be saying -- is how we arrive at Blanche DuBois in 2013. Tossed off the Wall Street planation, Jasmine has been left for near-dead.

We see glimpses of the person Jasmine once was when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a San Francisco businessman with political ambitions. Dwight understands that Jasmine is the kind of woman he proudly can drape over his arm. She knows how to behave herself around money, an asset for any politician's spouse. And, when she's on her game, she looks great.

Of course, Dwight eventually must discover how wrong he is about Jasmine. It's a bit of a stretch to think that the wife of a notorious Wall Street criminal wouldn't instantly be recognizable to someone like Dwight, but this lapse of plausibility also proves forgivable in light of Blanchett's bravura turn.

Baldwin's Hal, whose criminality fuels the story, is seen in flashbacks that put both his arrogance and indifference to conventional morality finds on display.

In what seems a digression as much as an enrichment, Louis C.K. shows up as an alternative suitor for Ginger, someone who gives the so-called "lesser" sister a chance to attain a new, more confident sense of her self. Don't expect a happily-ever-after.

By the time, Blue Jasmine concludes, Jasmine's personality has shattered. She's left talking to herself, one of those sad, anonymous people you see wandering the streets of some cities. It's a sobering moment, and it makes you wonder: Has Jasmine been talking to herself for her entire life? Has she ever been able to step outside the kind of delusions that make her so appalling, so human and so deeply tragic?