Bradley Cooper pays respectful homage to Leonard Bernstein in this lavish passion project.

The problem inherent to most biopics is one of balance. Err too far on the side of worshipful and you get nonsense like Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Or you could swing in the other direction and you end up with an “oops, all warts” camp disaster like Mommie Dearest. Most linger somewhere in the middle, at a respectful distance, so that they’re ultimately kind of boring, and offer nothing new or particularly insightful about its subject matter.

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, about the life of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, isn’t boring. It’s too visually dazzling for that. It does not, however, leave one feeling like they’ve really gotten to know more about Bernstein other than he was a complicated, workaholic genius who struggled with his sexuality, which is all information that could be gleaned from his Wikipedia page. But it sure is lovely spending time in his world for a little while.

Given the opportunity to direct it after Martin Scorsese stepped down, Maestro turned into a passion project for Cooper, as illustrated by his reportedly spending six years learning how to conduct an orchestra. Cooper’s eye for accurate detail clearly shows: every frame of the film is lovingly crafted with elegance and vintage style. Even Cooper himself, playing Bernstein, went through a physical transformation, and looks remarkably like his real-life counterpart, particularly in his older years. Part of said transformation involved wearing a prosthetic nose, which was, unsurprisingly, criticized on social media.

The nose isn’t distracting, exactly (not in the same way that Rami Malek’s fake teeth were in Bohemian Rhapsody, at least), but it does seem to hint that perhaps Cooper lacked confidence in his storytelling ability, and so thought it was better to attempt to overwhelm the audience with his attention to realism. In short, it’s not necessary, and the film would stand on its just fine without it.

Though promoted as a biopic about Bernstein, it’s predominantly about his relationship with Felicia Montealegre, his wife, mother of his children, and occasional muse. The film opens just before they meet, as Bernstein, just 25 at the time, makes his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Though he’s happily in a relationship with musician David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), when “Lenny” Bernstein is introduced to the elegant, demure Felicia (Carey Mulligan) at a party, their attraction is immediate. She’s drawn to his rakish personality and infectious love for life, while he admires (and eventually grows to depend on) her maturity and nurturing, gentle nature.

Felicia is the grounded force that supports Lenny in his astonishing rise to fame, both guiding him in his work (which included composing the score to no less than West Side Story) and in running the beautifully appointed home where they raise three children. A Bohemian at heart, however, Lenny finds himself longing for the free-wheeling life he had in his younger days, and soothes himself with alcohol, drugs, and the company of other men. The ever-patient Felicia has less trouble with that than she does with Lenny not being able to conduct such dalliances with decorum, behind closed doors, and it begins to take a toll on their marriage, which Lenny doesn’t truly learn to appreciate until it’s almost too late.

Make no mistake, Maestro is a gorgeous movie to look at, particularly during its first half, when it’s filmed mostly in black and white. In fact, silvertone black and white never looked so good, and not since Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth did shadows seem to all but act as secondary characters. It’s particularly effective in giving Lenny and Felicia’s courtship the fantastical appearance of being a movie within a movie, a grand 40s-style musical with fast-talking, wisecracking characters, and even a dance number right out of On the Town. 

Every frame of the film is lovingly crafted with elegance and vintage style.

In fact, this part of the film is so effective that it’s a bit of a comedown when it shifts into color and becomes far more of a standard “beloved entertainer with a messy, tragic personal life” story. Cooper and Mulligan are both doing excellent work (particularly Mulligan, whose eyes say more than pages and pages of dialogue ever could). Nevertheless, the script, written by Cooper and Josh Singer, while competently written, is both disappointingly narrow in scope, and too often relies on the typical notes and beats of a biopic. Even if you didn’t know anything about Lenny and Felicia’s relationship, just by design of what kind of movie it is, you know that discord will eventually be on the horizon. Of course there is, otherwise there wouldn’t be the necessary low lows to balance out the high highs.

It also occasionally relies on moments that feel a bit too on-the-nose, like a scene in which Felicia, watching Lenny conduct, stands in his enormous, looming shadow, or when an older Lenny blasts R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” out of his car (look up the lyrics if you don’t get what I mean). These moments don’t feel amateurish so much as unnecessary, particularly when the first half of the movie proves that Cooper is quite capable of something both beautiful, and unique. I didn’t just come out of Maestro wanting to know more about Leonard Bernstein, but about Bradley Cooper’s potential for being a truly excellent filmmaker once he allows himself to break free of conventional tropes.

Maestro is now available on Netflix.

Maestro Trailer: