I couldn’t tear at this corny old gush, says JAN MOIR

HE NOT only directs and stars in the film, he co-wrote the script, composed some of the songs and took guitar and singing lessons for 18 months so that he could perform them himself, too.

He probably sewed the sequins onto Gaga’s costumes and helped to apply the dye for the orange hair Ally inexplicably adopts when she becomes famous.

Amid the delicious Brad-o-vision, there is little escape from his interminable dad rock guitar solos, his croaking voice, his blurry alco-gaze.

The film’s soundtrack is set to top the charts in America, but the truth is that without the Hollywood gloss and the lavish marketing budget, Brad would struggle to get a gig with the Muppets house band.

And speaking of artistic truth, Jackson may overindulge in stimulants, but with his great teeth, ripped torso (shower scene alert) and tanned skin, he is the most gorgeous rock ’n’ roll junkie you have ever seen.

My real issue with this film is that there is something illusory about it; we never get a sense of the grand passion that swept the couple away.

Bradley is so busy taking guitar lessons and singing live and acting drunky-wunky and revelling in his own virtuosity that some of the basics have been overlooked.

Particularly nailing the story to the mast and making us believe in Jackson and Ally and their journey together, building on the narrative purpose of their relationship.

Everything happens too fast, too neat, as they cope with the pet peeve of the globally famous, which is coping with the pressure of being globally famous. Lady Gaga recently appeared on the Ellen talk show in the U.S., where she claimed that A Star Is Born 'addresses substance abuse and mental health and co-dependency issues'. That is also part of the problem. Films such as this.. can't lust be entertainment

any more, they have to have a message plus a grab bag of issues dealt with in a scrupulously non-judgmental, fashionably liberal way.

‘it is not your fault, it is a disease,’ Ally tells Jackson of his addiction, after he drunkenly disgraces himself in public. is it really? Many psychologists would argue instead that it is a condition over which sufferers have agency.

YET Cooper the director seems to fear moral rectitude. in his film, Jackson isn’t jealous or cruel, nor bitter and pathetic. He is sympathetically cast as the product of a broken childhood; a gallant whose alcoholism is given a Disney glow. He is neither victim nor hero, not entirely blameless nor completely culpable. And if he is not good and he is not bad, and if he is not to be pitied nor condemned, then what is he? Little more than a handsome cipher who looks good in his cowboy hat. A Star is Born leaves no impression. it drifts by in a sea of terrible songs, often just a little bit too pleased with itself.

The 1976 version had its faults, but within an hour Streisand and Kristofferson were in the studio, their hands clasped together on the mic, singing evergreen — still a spine-tingling moment 40 years later.

There is no such moment and no such song here, only a director who claimed that the point of creating art is to ‘deal with the desperate reality of being alive’ and ‘the wound of being a human being’.

no wonder that amid the forest of weeping willows in Fulham’s Cineworld i am a lonesome pine, unable to gush at this awful gush.