First off, if you don’t go, I feel like it’s your loss. It is amazing. Full of the full range of the ecstasy, joy, struggle and pain shared by two people in love. It showed more beautifully than anything I’ve seen in a long time that it isn’t what other people see that matters. It is the day to day relationships, love, companionship, laughter and struggles behind closed doors, in the privacy of your home. There is no amount of fame and money that can change that.

I found myself expecting the kind of pace and cadence I have become accustomed to in a movie. The kind where the scene cuts at the end of the sentence so there’s never silence and it never becomes too real because when it starts to get uncomfortable the music starts in the background and you know that it is going to end in this witty, perfect, poignant moment. That is not this movie. This was a movie where there was silence and there was space and there was the awkwardness of the phrase that is left hanging when it is not responded to in exactly the way that you had hoped. It gave you time to feel what they were feeling, to absorb the joy and the hope and the struggle and the bone crushing disappointment. This was the struggle of two people who loved each other more than anything and the story of what each of them would give for the other.

I have a newfound respect for Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. This movie was brilliant and daring and even though it has been done before this approach was a risk. They made it fresh and current and somehow even more poignant and real and raw and powerful. It is so different In its pace and energy than anything I have seen in a long, long time. Both of them were capable of being so much themselves on screen that it did not feel like you were watching a movie anymore. It felt like you were there, in these two peoples lives, going through it with them. Feeling the high of unbelievable joy one moment and the kind of grief that makes it hard to breathe in the next. I have already bought the soundtrack and will definitely see this movie many more times. Go with someone who allows you to lose yourself in the story without interruption and definitely take a tissue.