Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Music: B

When I first saw Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born nearly a year ago, I expressed appreciation for how pleasantly surprised I was by how it made me feel seen, as a gay man. The film featured drag queens and gay characters fairly prominently, and it felt very much like a nod to the gay fans of the woman who first made the title role so famous: Judy Garland. She didn’t originate the role, nor was she anywhere near the last one to play it, but she certainly made it hers: if Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz were not her most iconic role, her role in the musical version of A Star Is Born would be.

It’s odd, then, that Judy, the new biopic directed by Rupert Goold and starring Renée Zellweger, never once mentions it. There are several references to The Wizard of Oz, and it ends with a wrenchingly emotional rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Judy is a bit uneven overall, but one thing it does quite memorably well is the same thing last year’s A Star Is Born did: it goes out of its way to acknowledge how much Judy Garland meant to gay people.

This is not something biopics of this sort did much of fifteen or twenty years ago, and it’s a nice change. A Beautiful Mind making no reference to John Nash’s homosexuality is just one example. Filmmakers at the time stated they opted not to mention it because they feared viewers would make the wrong connection between Nash’s sexuality and his schizophrenia, but it feels likely that if the film were made today, they would have found a respectful way to fully represent the man. And here, with Judy, Garland isn’t presented as at all queer. But her decades-long status as a gay icon is certainly recognized.

It’s not just a passing reference, either. Judy is set during the last year or two of Judy Garland’s life, with occasional flashbacks to her teenage years as a budding superstar treated so horribly by the studio that they are essentially blamed for her addiction to pills. In this final stage of her shortened life and career, she is desperate to make a living, has a terrible reputation as an unreliable performer, and she moves temporarily to London for an extended residency. Her star has faded enough by this point that she only has two fans waiting for her out the side stage door, and they are a middle-aged late-sixties gay couple, who have been buying tickets to every night’s performance — something Judy notices. In one extended sequence, she invites them out to dinner, and, being too late for anything to be open, they invite her for eggs at their place. They bond over being lonely, misunderstood, emotionally isolated people. It sounds like something so easily corny, but I was deeply moved by it.

In fact, I was so moved by Zelleger’s career-high performance — if she’s not nominated for an Academy Award it will be a miscarriage of justice — it was relatively easy for me to overlook the fact that her singing, while perfectly decent, does nothing to illustrate what a uniquely powerhouse voice Judy Garland had. Granted, this is at the end of her life, she’s two years past a suicide attempt that damaged her voice, and she refuses even to rehearse; it would make sense her voice is not at its peak ability.

That said, it’s a curiously long time before any singing is heard at all, and it’s only ever heard by the elder version of Judy. The teen Judy, played otherwise competently by newcomer Darci Shaw, is never heard or seen singing at all, and her youth is the period in which he voice catapulted her to stardom. Although no modern singer could ever match the unparalleled cadence of Judy Garland’s voice, this still feels like a bit of a travesty. How is anyone watching this film supposed to understand and properly contextualize this woman’s life story without ever hearing her voice at its peak? With the right skill and finesse, even lip syncing to Judy’s real voice could have worked. It certainly would have lent this film greater weight. As it is, her enduring status as an icon as presented here feels a tad too abstract, and that’s a pity. This is a woman whose voice made her, and in a biopic about her, we never actually hear it.

So really, Judy relies heavily on aging movie-goers who still have a working memory of when Judy Garland was still alive, or at least have working memories of when her movies and music outlasted her for decades in cultural impact. In that context, the movie still works surprisingly well, avoiding the typical trap of trying to cram a person’s life into two hours and instead mostly focusing on just a couple of years. The editing keeps it at a brisk pace without ever feeling rushed, because this story is focused on the end of a fading megastar.

And most importantly, Renée Zellweger sells it. Some have called her performance “a gimmick,” but that’s now how I saw it at all. This is a woman with a distinctive look, easily recognizable in nearly all her roles, and she disappears completely in this movie, totally transforming into Judy Garland. Seeing clips taken out of context may make it seem odd or idiosyncratic, but Zellweger embodies her wholly as a character, giving her wide ranging dimension. I totally forgot the actor I was looking at, and completely bought her as Judy. How else could the moment where it reaches “Over the Rainbow” be so emotionally affecting? I was nearly as moved by that as I was by the earlier scene with the gay couple, and all she was doing was singing a song. I made a mistake not bringing tissues.

Judy is an imperfect but effectively respectful portrait of an icon, without ever even representing when she was at the top. All we ever see is the beginning of her rise, or the end of her wane, and still it paints a complete picture, and it’s one worth considering.

Overall: B+