Streisand has more talent than she knows what to do with, and the heart of a lion. But she's made a movie about the unassuming, unaffected person she wants us to think she is, and the image is so truthless she can't play it.

A Star is Born rarely stops seeming manufactured; it can't disguise its manipulations or the process of the storytelling. You see the tangled strings, not the puppets.

The trouble with rock 'n' roll in A Star Is Born is that there isn't any. The soundtrack is filled with homogenized harmonics passing for rock, but not a single song is good enough even to be counterfeit.

For all its faults, I enjoyed A Star is Born. It's a chemistry experiment, and the chemistry -- between the stars -- is good.