Bradley Cooper looks just like Leonard Bernstein in ‘Maestro’

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
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The orchestra is tuning up.

Netflix has released five images from the set of “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s forthcoming biopic of the late composer/conductor/educator/raconteur Leonard Bernstein, out in 2023. And even though no one’s heard even one note, the “bravo!”s are in, at least as the makeup and costuming is concerned.

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The first of the three images show Bernstein as a younger man, with Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealgre, a stage and television actress who married Bernstein in 1951. The second picture is probably shot on location at the Koussevitzky Music Shed at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. (The production did go up there for a time.) 

The fourth and fifth pictures are the real stunners from a transformation perspective. Bernstein is shown “at work” (e.g. conducting and agonizing over his art) later in life. You’ll note there is a deep red jacket slung over a chair. He wore that color a lot. 

As with “A Star Is Born,” which was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, and nabbed Lady Gaga, Mick Ronson, Anthony Rossomando, and Andrew Wyatt a Best Song Oscar, Cooper has co-written the script himself. Also credited is Josh Singer, whose previous credits include high profile projects like “First Man,” “The Post,” “Spotlight,” and episodes of “Fringe” and “Lie To Me.” He was also a staff writer on “The West Wing.” 

That “Post” connection is notable, as “Maestro” boasts Steven Spielberg as one of its producers. Spielberg’s last film, of course, was “West Side Story,” one of Bernstein’s great triumphs as a composer. (Spielberg was also, for a time, attached to direct.) Also producing is a New York-based filmmaker you may have heard of, Martin Scorsese. This is the first time the two have worked together on a narrative film. (There is the story, however, of how the two titan’s “traded” projects, on “Cape Fear” and “Schindler’s List.”)

So we know who’s behind the project (and that Maya Hawke plays one of Bernstein’s kids, and Matt Bomer is in the film as well) but we don’t exactly know what the movie will be about. Will Bernstein’s sexuality be the central premise? Or his struggle to balance his time as a composer of his own work versus being one of the greatest conductors of Western Classical music of his period? How much will focus on the fundraiser party he and Felicia hosted for the Black Panther Party, which inspired Tom Wolfe’s 1970 essay “Radical Chic”? 

I just pray we get to see Bernstein doing what he can to bridge the generation gap by playing rock music in a classical context for “the kids” (see below), or, better yet, explaining how Hector Berlioz’s early 19th century “Symphony Fantastique” had created “the first psychedelic symphony in history, the first musical description ever made of a trip, written one hundred thirty odd years before the Beatles.” (Let that one stream all day in the background.)

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