American women won the right to vote in 1920. Twelve years later, American men were already killing themselves over that.

That’s one way to look at What Price Hollywood?, the precode George Cukor movie that set the template for four iterations of what became known as A Star Is Born.

In the original, written by Adela Rogers St. John—also a major news reporter who deserves her own biopic—the starlet’s ambition is as overpowering as her male mentor’s alcoholic self-doubt. All subsequent versions, starting with the 1937 Star directed and written by William Wellman, with input from Dorothy Parker and others, centre on a naive ingénue carried along by luck and increasingly ambivalent, eventually nasty patronage.

The iconic 1954 take, again directed by Cukor, had Judy Garland and James Mason; the ’76 trainwreck (adapted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne) paired Barbra Streisand with Kris Kristofferson. 

In each case, the rising stars are morbidly concerned with their looks, and that continues with Lady Gaga, very convincing as one-named Ally (her forebears were all called Esther), facing off against writer-director Bradley Cooper, as an established country-rocker called Jackson Maine. He’s a drunk—not nasty, at least—who takes the unknown singer-songwriter under his leather-fringed wing. This update is less anguished, has better songs, and, even at 135 minutes, is actually shorter than the last two.

After Jackson discovers Ally singing “La Vie en Rose” in a drag bar, she soon delivers her own song to thousands of his adoring fans. Much of the music was written by Cooper, Gaga, and Lukas Nelson (son of Willie), who also leads Jackson’s band in the live stuff, and everyone appears to be singing and playing live. (Cooper knocks out some impressive solos on a battered Gibson ES-335.)

There’s a snake in the garden, however, as an English talent manager (Rafi Gavron) soon offers Ally a shot at instant stardom. But what price Spotify?

The problem with rise-and-fall tales is that the rise part is always unique and the falls are all the same. The buildup is electrifying, but plot construction is unusually slapdash in the second half. In all the Stars, men are facing their waning days while the women get going. But there’s nothing here to explain why Jackson’s solid career would suddenly slide with his marriage to the hot new thing. Certainly, his own team would want a piece of that action, but instead of business manoeuvring, we get back story about Jackson’s rivalry with tour-manager brother, played expertly by Sam Elliott, who is, ahem, 30 years older than Cooper.

Meanwhile, Ally has no mother, no female friends, and not much say in her new career. (Andrew Dice Clay is good, if repetitive, as her working-class dad.)

As her rootsy sound transforms into pop artifice, the movie seems to disapprove of that Gagalike direction but doesn’t bother to explore the meta-contradictions. There are fleeting subplots as things wind down, and Cooper, channelling Kristofferson’s wounded sensitivity (and voice), works hard to make his character’s selfishness look generous.

But the story ultimately reaches back to 1932, with the powerful white guy somehow incapable of surviving the advent of anyone else’s clout. As our Maine man sings (via Jason Isbell’s music) right at the start, “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.”