Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro is a rousing rhapsody — Venice Film Festival review

What is harder — invention or interpretation? Creating a persona for yourself or being your true self? Conceiving a character from scratch or capturing the essence of a real person?

These questions swirl around and through Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s infectious and insightful portrait of Leonard Bernstein like the smoke rising from the conductor’s ever-present cigarette. Co-written by, directed by and starring the actor, it begins, like last year’s Tár, with a conductor interview, though here the exercise is more emotional than coolly intellectual. We see Bernstein in later life, at the piano, reminiscing and moving himself to tears. Are they tears of gratitude or regret? Cooper takes us back in time to decide for ourselves.

First stop is the 1940s, these early scenes bursting with vim as Bernstein and other bright young things exchange witty repartee in high-contrast black and white. The conductor achieves career altitude with indecent haste and never looks down from his giddy cloud nine of rehearsals, performances, parties and nights with handsome young men. Living inside a whirlwind leaves no time for looking inward. Even the most private moments are shared, the toilet door left open for fear of missing something — perhaps for fear of being alone?

The first major shift comes with the arrival of Felicia Montealegre, the love of Bernstein’s life in a life of many lovers. In many ways, this is Lenny and Felicia’s story. Cooper announces her arrival in old Hollywood fashion with an adoring close-up and a swell of strings. If conveying Bernstein’s bounteous charisma demands a dazzling, full-wattage star turn from Cooper, Carey Mulligan proves every bit his equal, exuding winsome charm as the Chilean actress, a graduate of the Audrey Hepburn school of mid-Atlantic elocution (so derribly elegant).

It is enough to turn the maestro’s head long enough for marriage, if not monogamy. But a sense of imbalance begins to form: when Felicia watches from the wings as Lenny conducts Mahler’s Fifth, Cooper frames her standing literally in his shadow. There are first hints too of inner conflict, Bernstein lamenting: “The world wants us to be only one thing, and I find that deplorable.”

If the film’s first half is a warm bath of nostalgia, what comes later is a cold shower of reality. Cooper signals the changes of eras and moods in boldly cinematic terms, the film’s aspect ratio changing, the screen suddenly awash in saturated 1960s colours. Lenny’s behaviour too becomes more lurid. “You’re getting sloppy,” notes Felicia as she catches him pawing a young male admirer at a party. Later, during rehearsals for West Side Story, she flashes daggers at the ever-present Tommy (Gideon Glick). Best of all is highly charged scene in which husband and wife finally confront the glaring issue of his sexuality, the tension crescendoing until an Easter Parade Snoopy drifts into view outside the window. Somehow the absurdist twist works: the elephant in the room has become a large inflatable beagle.

Cooper too has taken on a larger-than-life figure and, against the odds, come out a winner. He gives everything to the performance and to this long-planned passion project. Arguments about the prosthetic nose he wears will no doubt rage on (even if accusations of “Jewface” say much about the trolls who make them), but his eye for filmmaking is no longer in question. His directorial debut A Star Is Born was wildly overpraised, but Maestro is the real deal: the rousing, complex and heartbreaking rhapsody its subject deserves. 

★★★★★

In cinemas from November 24 and on Netflix from December 20

Festival continues to September 9, labiennale.org/en/cinema/2023