Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein Movie Is No Ordinary Biopic

Bradley Cooper’s second film Maestro, like his 2018 debut A Star Is Born, tells the story of a passionate but turbulent romance conducted in the floodlight glare of entertainment-industry fame. Maestro also resembles A Star Is Born in that Cooper again directs himself as one half of the famous, feuding couple. But rather than a reinvention of a much-readapted Hollywood fable, Maestro is a cinematic imagining of a real-life love story: the 26-year marriage of the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein to the actor Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).

Maestro doesn’t constitute as shining an example of its genre as its predecessor did for the film musical (then again, I was a sucker for A Star Is Born, whose soundtrack I still put on to belt along to on occasion). But Cooper’s sophomore film far outshines the common run of contemporary biopics in its artful construction and attention to emotional nuance. The relationship between Felicia and Leonard, and the complicated one both have later with their grown daughter (Maya Hawke), feels tangible, textured, and real. That’s a lot for any movie to accomplish, and biopics in particular often tend to frog-march their subjects through a procession of life events rather than taking time to dwell with them in intimate everyday moments. Not every choice Cooper makes in Maestro works, either as director or actor—but the man is out there making choices, and when a moment does land, it lands hard.

One of the best ideas on the filmmaker’s part is to score the story of Bernstein’s life with his music starting from the first frame, as an aged version of the by then internationally famous composer appears, reminiscing for what seems to be a journalist’s or documentarian’s camera as he sits at a grand piano, smoking. (Get ready for lots of smoking.) Not every piece used on the soundtrack will be recognizable to a non-Bernstein expert, though a familiar hook from his most widely known composition, the music for West Side Story, sneaks in at one point to cheeky effect. But that familiar Bernstein sound, optimistic and sweeping and somehow sonically American, pervades the film.

The man himself, as played by Cooper, could also be described as optimistic and sweeping. Leonard is a huge personality, a gregarious lover of life and a bringer-together of people—but also, often, a blithe ignorer of the demands he makes on them and the pain he causes the ones he loves most. In an early scene that sets the tone for many uncomfortable moments to follow, he introduces his wife-to-be to his longtime lover (Matt Bomer), seeming to bubble over with excitement at the chance for his two favorite people to get to know each other. The marriage at the center of Maestro is a version of what was once called a “lavender marriage,” a union in which one or both partners are closeted homosexuals looking to pass in straight society. In the case of the Bernsteins, Lenny is the only queer member of the couple; our first glimpse of him as a young man, filmed now in black and white, is of him bounding out of the bed where he’s been lounging with a naked male partner and rushing straight down a long hallway to the stage on Carnegie Hall.

It’s true that, at the time of his surprise stage debut at age 25, replacing a guest conductor who had been taken ill at the last minute, Bernstein was living in an apartment on an upper floor of the venerable performance venue. But the movie never quite explains this fact, enhancing the dreamlike quality of Lenny’s sudden transition from bed to stage. The movie has recourse at other moments to this kind of dream logic: When Felicia visits a rehearsal for the Bernstein musical On the Town while she and Lenny are falling in love, the two of them are swept up in a dance number as if they were principals in the show themselves.

Lavender or no, the Bernstein-Montealegre marriage is far from a pure arrangement of convenience. On the contrary: These two passionate, creative people understand and care for each other deeply, even as it becomes cruelly clear that Lenny will never stop betraying Felicia with a succession of handsome young men. The script, co-written by Cooper and Josh Singer, is attuned to the mores of the period the film is set in: The impossibility of living openly as a gay man in the public eye is something the characters accept without question, even as that secrecy destroys the integrity of their most important relationships. Late in the film, their adult daughter confronts her parents about the rumors she’s been hearing that her father has affairs with men. Lenny and Felicia, conferring in private about how to handle the situation, may differ on strategy, but they agree on one painful fact: Of course their child must be lied to.

The best moments of Maestro are when Cooper lets his filmmaking choices tell the story. In one bravura scene shot in a single, stationary take, we see the couple from a distance as they argue bitterly during a Thanksgiving gathering at their Manhattan apartment. The room they’ve withdrawn from the party to fight in overlooks Central Park West, and as Felicia gives voice to years of bottled-up resentment in dialogue that’s too overlapping to be completely audible, the Macy’s parade rolls incongruously past in the background. The scene ends on a visual joke that is poignant and absurd at the same time. It’s one of the movie’s highlights, and evidence that Cooper the director is possessed of a cinematic imagination that could take his future career in whatever direction his next obsession leads him.

What about Cooper the actor? His decision to play Bernstein in heavy makeup, including a prosthetic nose to match the conductor’s sizable schnoz, has been critiqued as an appropriative and even antisemitic gesture. I agree with the film historian Mark Harris that the use of a false nose as part of a transformative makeup job is not ethnically “problematic”—Bernstein’s three children, who participated in the making of the film, have released a statement saying as much themselves. But the radicality of Cooper’s physical transformation—realistic as its effects may be—at times puts his Leonard Bernstein in a category that might be regarded as stunt performance. Maestro does not entirely escape the current unfortunate fixation, in films based on real-life events, on re-creating famous photographs or film clips with hyperreal exactitude. (For a much worse offender on this score, see Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde.) A scene in which Bernstein conducts Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral in England is a nearly shot-for-shot reproduction of the filmed record of that performance. It’s a rousing moment with an all-in turn from Cooper, re-creating the conductor’s charisma, vigor, and visible joy in communicating his love for music to the audience. (Cooper, who remembers pretending as a child to conduct along with his parents’ classical albums, studied the art of conducting with stars like Gustavo Dudamel to prepare for the role.) But there’s something about the scene’s verisimilitude that feels excessive, almost fussy. Unlike the conducting scenes in Tár, each of which told us something we didn’t know previously about Cate Blanchett’s ever-less-in-control star conductor, this lengthy reenactment seems to be more about displaying Cooper’s actorly and directorial virtuosity than about the arc of Maestro’s title character. And he is virtuosic, the music is marvelous, and the scene moving—but maybe less moving than it would have been at slightly less bombastic length.

To his credit, though, Cooper has the directorial generosity to recognize that the character the movie truly belongs to, despite the title, is not the maestro but his less famous mistress. Mulligan’s performance as Felicia is one of her finest to date in an accomplished career, a portrait of a complex, brilliant, and frustrated woman etched with the utmost economy and restraint. Felicia Montealegre was the Costa Rica–born, Chile-bred, half-Jewish-American product of a British convent-school education. That’s a lot of character notes to play at once (and arguably a greater act of cultural appropriation than a rubber nose), but she nails every one, right down to the hard-to-place but upper-crust-sounding accent. Mulligan plays some late scenes that could easily have fallen into bathos with such muted sorrow and hard-won wisdom that she requires no age makeup to make you believe she has lived a long, tough, and fulfilling life. A host of secondary performances in Maestro also shine, including Sarah Silverman as Lenny’s worldly-wise sister and Hawke as his adoring but reproachful daughter. But it’s Mulligan’s face in one scene, smoking in silence as she half-listens to the conversation of visiting friends while disguising her own inner turmoil, that sticks with me as the movie’s most powerful dramatic moment. Maestro could have used more of that kind of quiet reserve in a few other sequences. But it’s a lovingly crafted evocation of a specific relationship at a specific moment in history, and an impressive accomplishment in what I hope will turn out to be a long and prolific career.