Maestro review: Bradley Cooper’s passionate ode to Leonard Bernstein

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an inspired ode to the late, great Leonard Bernstein. It’s also a thorny deconstruction of the man-as-tortured-genius trope, replete with a compassionate focus on his put-upon wife and the bond the two shared for close to three decades. Ambitious in scope and featuring two powerhouse performances at its center, the Netflix release makes good on the promise shown in Cooper’s debut, A Star Is Born, another behind-the-scenes musical romance two-hander that explored the promise and price of ambition.

When we first meet Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) in Maestro, he is 24 years old and has recently been named assistant conductor to Artur Rodziński at the New York Philharmonic. Answering a phone call that would change his life, Bernstein is told that guest conductor Bruno Walter has come down with the flu. Cooper doesn’t show us Bernstein’s face; we find him in darkness, silhouetted to the right in a beautifully composed black-and-white shot with the bed in the foreground and a curtained window in the background. Nevertheless, the effect the call has on the young conductor is palpable. An ebullient Bernstein outright agrees to conduct that day’s performance with little notice and no rehearsal. In his mind, and seen through Cooper’s camera, Lenny runs out toward the balcony at Carnegie Hall where the empty venue calls out for his musical genius—and his wide-eyed energy—to fill it. Moments later, he returns to himself and to his room where a naked young man basks in Lenny’s excitement.

That tour de force opening sequence is an early indication that the actor-director has gifted Matthew Libatique (A Star Is Born, Black Swan) yet another opportunity to show why he’s one of the most thrilling cinematographers working today. Libatique’s work with Cooper and Darren Aronofsky has shown him to be a D.P. who understands how best to shuttle between crackling, kinetic scenes of wonder and carefully choreographed moments of intimate alienation. Maestro may be his crowning achievement, an exercise in controlled fluidity—assured and confident bursts of bottled spontaneity—that mirrors Bernstein’s own sensibility and talents.

That night in 1943 forever changes Bernstein’s life. Soon enough his musical talents, in conducting and composing, are the toast of the town; and it’s in that moment of endless promise that he meets Felicia Montealegre Cohn (a never-better Carey Mulligan), a dazzling, aspiring young actress raised in Chile who’s immediately smitten with Lenny. It is their life and love story, more so than Bernstein’s career, that takes center stage in Maestro.

Cooper, working from a script he co-wrote with Josh Singer (Spotlight, First Man), isn’t uninterested in what made Bernstein such a magnetic and influential presence, whether behind a piano or up on a podium (we get plenty of moments of both, which allow the actor to showcase his mimicry skills). But he’s clearly more fascinated with the way this soon-to-be-husband and wife built a life in the wings of a towering career that would shape 20th-century American music. It’s a bold choice that ends up skewing the film away from the hagiographic portrait Maestro could have been, and at times still remains.

The romantic and romanticized opening section of the film is focused on Bernstein and Felicia’s courtship, and obliquely on the way it drew the young maestro away from men like Matt Bomer’s David Oppenheim (who watches agog as his lover leaves him for a prim and proper girl) and into the spotlight where his personal life makes him palatable to the audiences he would court at the Philharmonic.

The time jumps that follow bring us into a technicolor world where Lenny and Felicia have first a young family and a brightened future ahead and, later two decades’ worth of rancor-laced affection that a terrifying health diagnosis melts away with unhurried ease. Throughout, the focus is on how central Felicia was to Lenny’s success. How she inspired him and cheered him on. How she made room for his abrasive charm to better thrive and how she was forced to look askance at his increasingly sloppy indiscretions with young men that fueled gossip all over Manhattan.

Such a focus would be curious were the film not so intent on avoiding making excuses for Bernstein’s at times indifferent (if not outright cruel) treatment of Felicia. Indeed, the signature tableau of Maestro, which its one-sheet singles out, is that of Felicia looking on at Lenny. From the front row. From the rafters. From the wings. From across the room. Cooper and Libatique often frame her just off center, her back to us, her eyes and attention presumably on the man whom she never ceases to be infatuated with and in awe of. It’s an image that makes us feel intimately close to her yet denies us the emotional cues a close-up would allow—which make the moments Mulligan’s face is front and center all the more powerful. The two-time Academy Award nominee is equally gifted at capturing Felicia’s giddy-eyed ingenuity upon meeting Lenny and eventually the world-weary wisdom that’s hardened her to sober truths she cannot bear to ignore (Mulligan’s delivery of the line, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely old queen,” in Felicia’s affected, mannered accent, is a thing of melancholy beauty).

In between telling their story, screenwriters Cooper and Singer offer us glimpses of the Bernstein that’s most familiar to American audiences: a man elated at the podium conducting orchestras, his entire body and soul immersed in the music he calls forth with his gestures. Yet those musical interludes, thrilling as they are to watch, are laced with cool detachment. Maestro sides with Felicia in pointing out how said performances revealed Bernstein to be, at times, much too self-involved and self-congratulatory about his own skills, deigning himself to let audiences bask in his reflected glory (in this you can almost see what attracted Cooper to role and story alike). It all adds up to the film offering a rather conflicted and conflicting portrait of the artist, one whose hubris and charm couldn’t be uncoupled from one another.

If the film is a tad baggy and unruly that seems by design and thus less a critique than an accurate assessment. But overall and while painting so boldly on such a broad canvas (the film spans decades and calls on its actors and make-up department to work overtime in delineating the passage of time) Maestro emerges as a bombastic aria of a biopic befitting its central subject.

Maestro opens November 22 in select theaters and starts streaming December 20 on Netflix