There’s a moment at about the halfway point of Maestro, the latest film from actor/director Bradley Cooper, where our protagonist, Leonard Bernstein (played resplendently by Cooper), explains to a sycophantic interviewer that he’s actually gravely disappointed by the volume of original work that he’s produced in his life. I don’t think your average person would consider themselves disappointed by Bernstein’s output – to the degree that the average person knows who he is at all in 2023 – though you might find yourself surprised by how few of his projects are original works by him. The music behind On The Town, Candide, and West Side Story, the film score for On The Waterfront; a run of brilliance, sure, but perhaps not the quantity expected from someone whose reputation is as esteemed as Bernstein’s.

I don’t mean to denigrate Bernstein, only to say I can understand an artist as overwhelmingly talented as him feeling unfulfilled. And this is the germ of Maestro, the meaning behind a biopic about America’s most beloved Twentieth Century classical music composer and conductor. Bernstein was a pure bon vivant, a figure who courted attention in any room, no matter the company; but his effervescence shielded a harsh insatiability and a narcissism that grew at the expense of those he loved most. Maestro is also about his wife, Felicia Montealegre (an absolutely stunning Carey Mulligan). Their relationship is the center of the film, and Cooper (co-writing the script with Oscar-winner Josh Singer) poses that Montealegre was one of the few people – if not the only person – who got to witness and experience all shades of the mercurial Leonard Bernstein.

Those keeping track will know that this has been a labor of love for Cooper, with a focus on the labor. The film passed through the hands of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (both listed as producers on the film), before Cooper himself amassed enough of a reputation to direct the film himself. This is the second feature from Cooper, after 2018’s A Star is Born, a hugely successful take on the classic Hollywood tale. Both films take advantage of Cooper’s skills as a musician and tap into what makes him tick as a performer: immensely talented men who are equal parts built up and undone by their unmatched abilities. Cooper is a very good actor, if not a great one, but he may well end up being a great director. Case in point, directing his own performances to be secondary to his co-stars. In A Star is Born, it was Lady Gaga. This time around, it’s Carey Mulligan.

Maestro is broken into two parts. The first part takes place in 1943, shot in a crisp black & white. Cooper’s Bernstein has just received a call that the conductor for the New York Philharmonic is unable to perform that night and as assistant conductor, he has been called upon to make his debut behind the podium – on extremely short notice and without the benefit of rehearsal. The rest is history, as they say, and Bernstein quickly rises to be the preeminent American conductor of his age. It’s in the first few years of this meteoric fame that he meets Montealgre, an actress immediately won over by Bernstein’s cup-runneth-over charm and unbridled enthusiasm. They start an immediate affair which quickly expands to marriage and children. This first part ends with a television interview that outlines just how thoroughly Bernstein has scaled the heights of the classical music world.

The second part takes place in the 1970s, shot in a warm but crackling color. The Bernsteins have been married for decades and their children are nearly adults. Such a long time in the limelight has worn the family thin, and Leonard’s penchant for sexual affairs takes its toll on Felicia’s dignity. That Leonard is a bisexual, and that his trysts are almost always with men appears to add an extra layer of hurt to the betrayal. Felicia made the knowing compromise when they married – knowing Leonard’s tastes and proclivities – but accepting the compromise is much different than executing it, and Leonard’s inability to keep it in his pants pushes their relationship to its breaking point. There is a long third act which is the film’s emotional high point, both a testament to their longstanding love and a parable about the pain of regret and the burden of responsibility.

The music, so beautiful and sweeping, definitely gets its showcase, but it is secondary within Cooper and Singer’s script. If there’s one thing that separates Maestro from other biopics (in particular, biopics about performers), it’s that it never argues that Leonard Bernstein’s faults were somehow contributing to his success. There is no faustian bargain made, but just a simple human being with an unbelievable talent. His triumphs evolve despite his penchant for emotional manipulation and duplicity, not because of them. With the exception of one scene where Leonard and Felicia end up within a sequence from On The Town, Maestro never tries to equate the personal drama with the work, instead making the radical point that imperfection is a fact of life and not some inevitable trait of the talented and famous.

Mulligan’s Felicia is mostly a bystander in Leonard’s life, accomplished in her own right but never really rising above “wife of Leonard Bernstein” being the first line item on her resume. But Felicia is also the key to which Maestro unlocks Leonard’s unseen interiority. This is a very handsome film, sure, but the brilliance of Cooper’s direction is the way he makes Felicia the main character in Leonard’s story. Felicia’s enduring love is not presented romantically, but tragically, forever compelled by a connection to man who’s unfaithful. If Cooper plays Leonard as impenetrable, than Mulligan makes Felicia an open book, projecting the much-needed pathos that Leonard is incapable of showing. It might come as a surprise the way Mulligan makes Maestro her movie, but it ranks high within the actress’s very distinguished array of performances.

There are parts of Maestro that I could quibble with – the interpersonal discord resolves itself too conveniently for my taste, and Cooper’s choice to shoot major conflict in wide, nondescript master shots takes a lot of the punch out of the drama – but this is a very effective adult drama. The film’s wild theatricality does right by its subject and, prosthetic nose controversy notwithstanding, Maestro might have some of the greatest aging make-up I have ever seen. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is doubled and complicated but still possesses the DP’s known lushness and precision. And of course, there’s the music, sprinkled liberally throughout every sequence, an unsubtle reminder that during all of this turmoil there was still unquestioned brilliance pouring out of this man’s soul. Cooper doesn’t want to make Leonard Bernstein anything miraculous. It’s in fact more impressive that Bernstein was particularly human after all.

 

Directed by Bradley Cooper