Lady Gaga gave a spirited performance in A Star is Born, but it would have helped the film’s cause if she were a newcomer, so that we might have shared in the revelation of talent. Something like that has happened in two similarly titled music dramas made 40 years apart: Bette Midler was not established internationally when she played a Janis Joplin-style rocker in The Rose, and nor is the 29-year-old Killarney-born Jessie Buckley, who makes a mighty impact in Wild Rose. Buckley, a runner-up in the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, starred last year in the thriller Beast. Her contradictory qualities of fragility and ferociousness receive an even more extensive airing in the new film, in which she plays Rose-Lynn Harlan, an aspiring country singer who can knock people out with her voice – and her fists.
Having served time for lobbing drugs over a prison wall, Rose-Lynn returns to her two young children, who are living in Glasgow with her disapproving mother (Julie Walters). Parenting isn’t uppermost in her mind. Her dream is to make it to Nashville, though it’s hard to walk in cowboy boots, let alone get through airport security, when you’re wearing an ankle tag.
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