Better Midler gives a smashing, touching, tear-the-house-down dynamic and exhilarating Oscar-nominated performance as the Rose, a fabulously wealthy and successful popular rock superstar sensation who's been burnt-out and worn down by too much long hard time on the road, too much booze and drugs (Rose likes to swig Southern Comfort straight from the bottle while performing live on stage), too many cameras in her face and too much time spent recording songs in the studio at the expense of having a meaningful and fulfilling personal life, all of which leaves Rose feeling terribly lonely, unhappy and unloved. Rose wants to take a much-needed vacation, but her pushy, ruthless, overbearing greedhead manager Rudge Campbell (flawlessly played to intensely contemptible perfection by Alan Bates) urges her to do a special hometown concert. Rose finds temporary solace in her relationship with good-looking nice guy drifter Houston Dyer (a characteristically top-drawer turn by the criminally undervalued Frederic Forrest, who deservedly snagged a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his superlative work here), but Dyer's inability to easily handle Rose's wild lifestyle of debauched excess only exacerbates the severity of Rose's depression, which goes off the deep end into total despair with tragic consequences.<br /><br />Loosely based on the real-life flash-in-the-pan live fast, live hard, live like today's almost over and tomorrow ain't never gonna happen and if you live like this too much you will most certainly die young sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll exploits of Janis Joplin, "The Rose" poignantly exposes the horrible price of fame and fortune, showing to often devastating effect the way fame destroys one's ability to have a personal life, pushes people to a near breaking point, and grinds people down to nothing after they lose the strength needed to withstand the strain being a famous person grimly entails. Mark Rydell's perceptive direction and the trenchant script by Bill Kirby and Bo Goldman neither glorifies nor vilifies the rock'n'roll lifestyle, opting instead to merely show its potentially dangerous pratfalls with a properly glum, depressing tone and an arresting, unflinching frankness.<br /><br />Vilmos Zsigmund's glittering, burnished, faded cinematography gives the film an appropriately blinding brightly saturated color flashy look, shooting the lively, uninhibited concert sequences through a dense smoky haze of piercing reddish hues (such fellow noted cameramen as Laszlo Kovacs, Owen Roizman and Haskell Wexler also lent a hand to the dazzling concert sequences). Toni Basil, who had a fluke top 10 hit tune with the waggish novelty song "Hey Mickey," did the raunchy'n'raucous dance choreography. Midler belts out all her songs in a hoarse, bluesy, whiskey-ravaged alto with incredible incendiary gusto; the highlights include the hauntingly beautiful and melancholy title ballad, a torchy, slow-burning rendition of "When a Man Loves a Woman," and a hilariously campy shredding of Bob Seger's "Fire Down Below" done in a drag queen bar with a bunch of outrageous transvestite celebrity lady impersonators (70's mock disco diva Sylvestor plays the Diana Ross lookalike). Midler's show-dominating tour-de-force portrayal gets sterling support from an exceptional cast peppered with stand-out character actors: David Keith as a bashful soldier, Jack Starrett as a country music road manager, John Dennis Johnson as a rowdy hick jerk in a hillbilly bar, Jonathan Banks as an oily TV promoter, Don Calfa as a smarmy music biz leech, Victor Argo as a bath house locker room attendant, Will Hare as an amiable grocer, and, in a particularly chilling and startling cameo, the great Harry Dean Stanton as a cold-hearted a**hole country singer/songwriter who flatly tells Rose right to her face that he thinks her singing stinks. A sad, insightful and eye-opening film, "The Rose" makes for a truly heart-breaking, but undeniably powerful portrait of an all-too-human and fragile person who gets led down the road to ruin by the very business that ironically made her.