A Battle Is Reborn On a Soundtrack as Lady Gaga Pits Pop Against Authenticity

In the new version of “A Star Is Born,” the seasoned, fading rock star Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) seizes a private moment with the up-and-coming singer and songwriter Ally (Lady Gaga), just as she ascends to full stardom. Against the backdrop of her new Sunset Boulevard billboard, he tells her she has to “dig deep” in her soul; he continues, “You don’t tell the truth out there, you’re [finished].” (He uses a stronger word.) He’s calling on her to make music with honesty and openness, to imbue her songs with that elastic and elusive concept: authenticity.

The movie’s visual style telegraphs authenticity with lengthy close-ups. For the music that functions as outlet and self-definition for the characters — the soundtrack album was released on Friday alongside the movie — the equation isn’t as simple.

It’s an album of peaks and troughs, of wide-open emotionality and thudding calculation. It’s both a souvenir of the movie — with a lot of dialogue snippets — and a pop statement on its own. And it’s the latest episode in the story arc of Lady Gaga, the self-invention of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

She arrived a decade ago as an over-the-top dance-pop diva, flaunting wigs, costumes, makeup and dance routines in a barrage of proudly superficial guises: Mirrors! Feathers! Roses! Spikes! Bubbles! Meat!

Her songs were driven by glossy, thumping dance-club beats, even as her lyrics insisted on darker impulses of attachment and obsession: “Chase you down until you love me,” she vowed in “Paparazzi.” At the same time, she was eager to prove that she was a skilled pianist and singer who had paid her dues at piano bars and remained a flesh-and-blood live performer, regardless of any trappings.

Like Madonna before her, she made theatrical pop spectacle and full-tilt self-expression parts of the same package. But a battle between the perceived ephemerality of pop and the assumed durability of something more authentic has raged on in her music.

She followed her 2008 album debut, “The Fame,” and its extended version, “The Fame Monster,” with “Born This Way,” an album that mingled electro-pop tracks with arena anthems, flaunting an emissary from “real” rock music: Bruce Springsteen’s saxophonist Clarence Clemons. The willful “Artpop” turned back to playful artifice, with art-world ambitions and diminishing returns.

So Lady Gaga swung the pendulum far the other way, recasting herself on established ground — as a song-and-dance trouper who’s melding Broadway and movie-musical conventions with the demands of current pop. She sang a medley from “The Sound of Music” on the Academy Awards; she made an album with Tony Bennett. “Joanne,” from 2016, made an insistent show of authenticity: a painful story from her family’s past, acoustic guitars, a wide-brimmed hat.

In “A Star Is Born,” she casts herself as simultaneously approachable and larger than life. The album is full of love songs. The 1954 Judy Garland version of “A Star Is Born” focused its songs on love and show-business ambition; the 1976 Barbra Streisand vehicle placed love alongside a woman’s self-assertion. The new one determinedly extols sincerity and truth-telling. Jackson Maine arrives onstage in the movie’s opening sequence to gulp down some booze and pills and then sing, “It’s time to testify/There’s no room for lies.”

For his character, the trappings of authenticity are straightforward. He’s a long-running rock archetype: a gruff-voiced, guitar-slinging, hard-drinking, country-rooted road warrior. His record collection is on vinyl; the camera lingers over his vintage stereo system. In the 1970s, his music would have been categorized as Southern rock or outlaw country; in the 2010s, he lands on the rowdier side of the arena-country mainstream. His songwriting collaborator and onstage bandleader is Lukas Nelson, Willie’s son.

As Ally, Lady Gaga gets all of the movie’s best songs; Cooper’s vary from serviceable to embarrassing (“Music to My Eyes” stays as labored as its title). But she also has a far more complicated relationship to supposedly unvarnished self-expression.

In the plotline, Ally’s genuine voice and charisma draw Maine to her in the first place, and her psychologically charged songwriting and unspoiled attitude seal their bond. Her room has a photo of Carole King on the wall. But she’s first presented as anything but natural: behind makeup and fake eyebrows, singing “La Vie en Rose” at a drag club. It’s not exactly a roots-rock repertoire. (In a nod to Garland, she also has an a cappella moment singing a snippet of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”)

Ally’s stardom is born when a reluctant stadium performance of a song she had just written makes her an overnight sensation by going viral on YouTube. It’s “Shallow,” the leadoff single and most boffo track on the soundtrack album. Though Cooper starts the song, Lady Gaga takes over for its exponential buildup, from throaty and breathy to full-scale belting. It’s another in her catalog of spiraling power ballads, and it’s the immediate sequel to “Million Reasons” from her theatrically naturalistic “Joanne.” Yet the song also features a Gaga trademark since the dance-pop days of hits like “Paparazzi” and “Poker Face”: a chorus built on stuttering repeated syllables, “in the sha-hal, sha-hal-oh.”

The album’s other showstoppers are piano ballads: the Elton John-flavored “Always Remember Us This Way”; the electronics-assisted hymn “Before I Cry”; and “I’ll Never Love Again.” They rely on Lady Gaga’s old-school finesse, timing, emotionality and lung power.

But it’s not the 1970s any more, and as soon as Ally gets her big chance, she discards her own truest assets. By the time Maine gives Ally his counsel about staying soulful, she has already taken on a manager and let him recast her with a flamingly unreal hair color and tacky dance-pop numbers that the actual Lady Gaga would have rejected (or twisted and vastly improved) in 2008. And in the movie’s suddenly cynical universe, that’s the material that apparently carries Ally to the Grammy Awards. In Cooper’s “A Star Is Born,” pop is irredeemably shallow, a mere commercial trick.

It’s odd for Lady Gaga, of all people, to be pitting modern pop against authenticity. Not that long ago, her hits insisted — as drag tradition does — that the most outsized artifice could also hold something true. Remaking an old story, the 2018 “A Star Is Born” relies on the old, time-honored solidity of the pop ballad. It tugs its heartstrings, but its path to authenticity is a return to the past.