MAESTRO 15 TBC

Prime conductor…

★★★★★ OUT 24 NOVEMBER CINEMAS 20 DECEMBER NETFLIX

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WEST SIDE STORY 1961 A snippet of Bernstein’s earworm score for this seminal musical – perhaps his best-known work – appears in Maestro.

A STAR IS BORN 2018 Tackling partnerships and music, Cooper’s directorial debut was an awardsseason smash. Maestro will surely repeat the gong-bothering.

TÁR 2022 Problematic, unfaithful, brilliant conductor brought to life with a full-throttle turn. Same, same.

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The latter half of 2022 saw Cate Blanchett roar into awards contention with her towering performance as a misanthropic conductor in Tár. A year on, it’s time for her to pass the baton – in more than one sense – to Bradley Cooper, who disappears inside his performance as Leonard Bernstein.

As well as starring in this study of the legendary composer-conductor, who died in 1990, Cooper is also director, producer, and -with Josh Singer -co-writer. Maestro’s screenplay eschews the cradle-to-grave biopic template, instead unpicking the fierce love and unconventional marriage at the heart of Lenny’s creativity and career over four decades.

Bookended by a TV interview with Bernstein in old age as he tickles the ivories and declares that ‘a work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them’, Cooper’s lyrical, musical (in terms of its dialogue, as well as Bernstein’s soaring scores) portrait doesn’t offer a finite encapsulation of a man, or spoon-feed us career milestones. Rather, it encourages both long-time Bernstein fans and the uninitiated to spend time with an irrepressible talent, sexually fluid lover and chain-smoker, leaving details of time/place/specific works of art to be googled after the credits.

As the older Bernstein plays A Quiet Place and notes the emotion it evokes in him as he reflects on his muchmissed wife, Cooper transports us back to Lenny’s big break: stepping up to conduct the New York Philharmonic in 1943. Lensed in monochrome Academy ratio, this segment also sees Bernstein sleeping with men, and Cooper sporting a controversy-stirring prosthetic nose that renders him avian. Before long we meet Maestro’s female lead, Carey Mulligan; as soon as she appears as Chilean actor Felicia Montealegre, with her clipped transatlantic diction and knowing eyes, the sparks begin to fly.

As Bernstein woos Felicia via an intoxicating On the Town song-anddance number, the duo chatter like the two little ducks he compares them to. Him with his theatrical sing-song cadence, her with an idiolect forged from British schooling and a career in American talkies, their words overlapping and tumbling, their needs and parameters felt out. ‘I want a lot of things,’ Lenny tells her as he’s whirled from her arms by a hot sailor. His voracious appetite – for people, for touch, for love – becomes the thread that runs through their marriage.

DIRECTOR Bradley Cooper STARRING Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer, Sarah Silverman SCREENPLAY Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer DISTRIBUTOR Netflix RUNNING TIME 129 mins

Felicia, supremely talented in her own right and adored by Lenny, works hard to stay out of his personal and professional shadow as black-andwhite gives way to colour (and a wider ratio) when we hit the 70s, where we see the maestro juggling family and reputation. This is where the movie is at its best: the Bernsteins established, the nose less distracting in a face now full of prosthetics, the showy directorial flourishes of the first section giving way to long, single takes. There’s the tangible sense of a family unit -but also the first cracks of disharmony.

Cooper and Mulligan, friends off screen, are organically believable as a partnership, dancing around each other linguistically in a way that’s thrilling to watch. A scene in a Manhattan apartment during Thanksgiving that begins with Cooper tripping over a table leg, then crescendos to a verbal opera as melodic as any of Bernstein’s works, showcases two performers at their best. It’s surely the clip that will make the rounds come awards season.

‘Cooper and Mulligan are organically believable as a partnership, dancing around each other linguistically in a way that’s thrilling to watch’

While Cooper captures Bernstein’s softness, tactile, playful nature and extreme enthusiasm, his performance makes most sense in opposition to and in tandem with Mulligan. And after she leaves the picture in a hugely affecting moment (one framed through a bedroom window), her presence is missed. Cooper’s uncanny depiction of Bernstein’s delirious, full-body conducting style is impressive and affecting as he leads Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and his own Mass, but it doesn’t quite match the emotional whammy of the midsection.

An accomplished and classy follow-up to 2018’s A Star Is Born, then, and one that proves Cooper is more than a one-hit wonder. But as an examination of artistic temperament, sexual voracity, and the patient women who love conductors, Maestro’s thunder has been stolen to a degree by Tár.

Equally, some viewers might feel that Cooper, despite using Bernstein’s diverse music like a Spotify playlist for his soundtrack, doesn’t provide enough career context to truly get a handle on his prodigious output. And those offended by the nasal augmentation, despite the Bernstein family’s blessing, may find it difficult to get past his beak.

THE VERDICT A nailed-on awards contender that distils the essence of a legend thanks to a pair of career-best performances. These little ducks are off to the races…