A Star Is Born

A Star Is Born (1976) is a rock drama directed by Frank Pierson that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Esther Hoffman is a singer doing small club gigs when fading rock star John Norman Howard catches her set and pulls her into the spotlight. He opens doors, she walks through them, and her career takes off while his collapses beneath him.

Kristofferson was already a working musician when he took the role, and it shows — his Howard is not a movie-star version of self-destruction but something ragged and specific. Streisand wrote "Evergreen" for the film, and the song took home the Academy Award for Best Original Song along with a Golden Globe. The two performers are genuinely uneven matches on screen, which is exactly the point.

Hollywood first told this story in 1937, revisited it in 1954, and this 1976 version transplanted it into the rock world. What stays consistent across all three is the core brutality: one person's ascent measured against another's freefall, in the same bed and the same house. Stream A Star Is Born (1976) online on iFILM.