Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in Maestro.

Jason McDonald/Netflix

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Jason McDonald/Netflix

Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in Maestro.

Jason McDonald/Netflix

The brand new biopic Maestro, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, tells a nuanced story of the larger-than-life musician Leonard Bernstein. Whereas the enduring conductor, composer and trainer was the propulsive drive in any room he walked into, this movie is a sympathetic, delicate portrait of his spouse, Felicia Montealegre Cohn, and their marriage.

Bernstein’s chaotic, irrepressible vitality at all times appeared to increase in 1,000,000 totally different instructions directly. That is clear from his personal music for each the live performance corridor and the stage, which is cleverly woven out and in of this movie, in impact changing into its personal suite of characters. However the coronary heart of Maestro is the story of Felicia.

Born in Costa Rica and raised in Chile, Felicia is performed right here by Carey Mulligan, who captures Felicia’s patrician, pan-continental accent and steely resolve in a masterful efficiency. The actual Felicia was a working actress when she met Leonard. She additionally knew, even early on, that he was bisexual — and that she was going to must ignore his aspect relationships to tackle the position of a lifetime: Mrs. Maestro.

“What day are we residing in? One will be as free as one likes with out guilt or confession,” she tells him after they grow to be engaged. (In actuality, they grew to become engaged, broke it off, and finally determined to provide their relationship one other go.) “Please, what is the hurt?” she continues. “I do know precisely who you’re. Let’s give it a whirl.”

She did not simply give it a whirl: They had been married for greater than 25 years. Leonard Bernstein was an infamously messy human being, notably in his later years … and Cooper would not draw back from that in Maestro. In a single scene, for instance, we see the elder statesman Bernstein instructing at Tanglewood — placing a far youthful conductor by way of his paces throughout a daytime teaching, then pawing on the identical younger man that evening on a hazy dance ground.

Cooper, who produced and co-wrote Maestro in addition to directing and starring in it, may simply have painted Bernstein as a narcissistic monster, just like the lead character in final yr’s movie Tar — however he would not. He would not fairly excuse him as a tortured genius, both. It is extra a portrait of a person who accommodates multitudes, and each the enjoyment and harm he casts on others. However the gravitational pull of Maestro is at all times the duet of Lenny and Felicia, no matter their relationship’s unusual rhythms.

One of many movie’s most rancid — and memorable — strains comes straight from their daughter Jamie’s 2018 memoir, Well-known Father Woman. Within the movie, Felicia and Lenny are preventing of their fairytale residence overlooking Central Park West, simply as an enormous Snoopy floats by the window throughout the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. “Should you’re not cautious, you are going to die a lonely previous queen,” she cries out.

(Years later, he tells a younger grownup Jamie, after she’s heard rumors about his dalliances, that they are all lies spurred by jealousy of his expertise.)

However together with all that sourness, there may be additionally sweetness, corresponding to on this tender alternate: “I am considering of a quantity,” he says as she laughs and makes a number of unsuitable guesses of their personal recreation. “It is two, darling.”

“Two,” she solutions dreamily.

“It is two, like us, darling,” he says. “Like us, a pair. Two little geese in a pond.”

The movie brims with vitality from Bernstein’s early years, forged in black and white, to the tremendous color-saturated, drug-fueled Eighties. Its dazzling visuals match the music — and sure, someplace in there, Maestro can be a film about making music.

Cooper is not essentially the most plausible Bernstein, regardless of a prosthetic (and arguably problematic) nostril and make-up — the well-documented voice is not fairly proper, neither is its cadence. However Cooper nonetheless captures a good quantity of Bernstein’s dynamism, particularly as a conductor. In a single prolonged sequence in Maestro, he leads Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 2 in a recreation of a well-known efficiency Bernstein performed at England’s Ely Cathedral in 1973.

The digicam rests on the conductor as Bernstein channels considered one of his personal heroes — and it is one of many longest, uninterrupted sequences of music on movie in latest reminiscence, whereas Mahler’s epically scaled music washes over the viewer like a tidal wave.

That second seems like Bernstein’s final purpose for being — and maybe the one alternative he has to flee himself.