The simple truth is this: Hollywood has a history of mucking up biopics, often reducing an individual’s life into too small a box or extending it far past the boundaries it should ever have reached. Some lives deserve the grand-scale treatment due to the scope of those they touched, while there are figures throughout time that warrant a more intimate exploration of how they made their mark. Inevitably, something goes awry, and you either have a movie that comes across as cinematic Cliffs Notes or a mini-series that is too long and fussily focused on every minute detail.

When you get the rare gems, like an Erin Brockovich, a Malcolm X, a Coal Miner’s Daughter, an Elvis, or even an Oppenheimer, you appreciate that you can walk away wanting to know more about the person rather than feeling you have the whole story. Film should inspire us to dive deeper and ask follow-up questions, and that’s what those movies do. That’s also why a movie like Maestro, inspired by the relationship between Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia, reaches new levels of superiority in showcasing a life while letting the audience naturally find their way forward.

Arguably the most significant American composer of our lifetime and one of the most prominent conductors in the 20^th century, Leonard Bernstein is synonymous with timeless works of musical art like the scores for the musicals West Side Story, Candide, On the Town, and the film On the Waterfront. He is credited with bringing classical music to the forefront of popular culture and gave mainstream credit to what was often seen as a niche genre for the upper-class elite. Mass, his work commissioned by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, was a divisive piece that brought multiple musical styles together and is still analyzed today.

If you are coming to Maestro expecting to see co-writer/director/star Bradley Cooper painstakingly recreate these moments of Bernstein’s life, be prepared to leave unfulfilled. How his art was made has been chronicled in numerous documentaries and literature, and a dramatization of these events would be a pure rehash of what is easily accessed by the curious. Instead, Cooper keeps his film tight and doesn’t focus on stuffing it all in and covering what we know, but reveals the moments we weren’t, couldn’t, have been privy to and shows how that molded a complex partnership with love at its core.

Bernstein’s twenty-six-year marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman) produced three children and was based on mutual respect for the talents each possessed. Though he shared a confident love for her that never faded, their union had its share of trials due to his open bisexuality, which led to an extended separation. Even if Montealegre and Bernstein had an agreement in their marriage to his being with men in private, the cracks it produced wound up taking too big of a toll. 

In Maestro, Cooper and Mulligan deliver outstanding performances that feel as if they are happening naturally for the first time in front of the camera. Cooper’s long takes don’t allow for much in the way of hiding your craft, so the work being done by the two leads is even more extraordinary. Mulligan’s is the less showy part but rises to greater heights by the finale, a devastating look at strong will being overruled by a body’s inability to stave off terminal illness. Cooper vanishes into the theatricality of Bernstein and conducts a scene (literally as the director of the film and as the actor playing Bernstein) that is astonishing. It will honestly take your breath away.

Co-writing the film with Oscar-winner Josh Singer (Spotlight), some see Maestro as Cooper’s second run at Academy Award glory after being so horribly snubbed in 2018 for his remake of A Star is Born. Though a supersonic hit with audiences and critics, Cooper didn’t even get nominated for Best Director and lost Best Actor to a performance from Rami Malek that was laughably bad. I don’t consider Cooper using Bernstein (who also never won an Oscar) and his relationship with Felicia as mere fodder for a trophy; you can tell that the filmmaker is invested in the work and, like his previous film, driven to make this a success.

There are so many tiny treasures present in Maestro, little flicks of memories that Cooper and Singer lifted from the lives of the Bernsteins, giving the film a sincere and unique touch. Cooper cuts a commanding figure as Bernstein, and the make-up/prosthetics used as he ages are outstanding. Eerie moments occur when you swear Cooper has inserted real shots of Bernstein with his frames to blur further the line between where reality ends, and biography begins.