Maestro

 

                        Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in “Maestro.” Jason McDonald/Netflix photos via IMDE.com.

An old adage holds that meeting an idol isn't always a good idea, if you don't want to be disillusioned.

That's the takeaway from “Maestro,” a penetrating portrait of monumental musical artist Leonard Bernstein, starring, directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper.

Considering how much sublime beauty and exuberant joy he brought to the world as a conductor, composer and concert pianist, “Lenny's” life offstage was a glorious mess. Darkness and unrequited hunger in his psyche counterbalanced the soaring highs he shared with adoring audiences.

Spanning three decades beginning in 1946, Cooper's ambitious epic follows the artist's meteoric rise and reign in concert halls around the world. His accomplishments extended to theatrical stages (“West Side Story”) and screens large and small, including his Young People's Concert series in the new medium of television.

But more central to Cooper's grand design, it chronicles Bernstein's 25-year marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). 

Cooper gives Mulligan top billing in the credits. Deservedly so. Hers is the more layered performance as she advances from radiant brilliance as a stage actress through the willing sacrifice of her own career in service to her husband's, into final painful decline.

Complicating their relationship was Bernstein's bisexuality. When, as a young assistant conductor, he received the phone call that would change his life – to step in for an ailing guest conductor and, without rehearsal, conduct the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall that afternoon – he was in bed with Jerome Robbins, destined for his own Broadway fame as a dancer and choreographer.

Although he submerged his sexuality in ensuing decades, becoming instead a doting father to his three children, Lenny would eventually become less discreet in his pursuit and seduction of younger men.

He was a charismatic figure of boundless enthusiasm and insatiable appetites. For all the exacting precision he expected from his musicians, on the podium he seemed ravished by the music, his face in ever increasing ecstasy, utterly spent by the final note.

Cooper learned to conduct with the same ferocity he brings to every detail of his portrayal – the frenetic Manhattan accent punctuated by the ever-present cigarette in his fingers or hanging from his lips. (“Maestro” should come with a surgeon general's warning of secondary smoke risks just from watching it.)

Around the central performances, with stars like Sarah Silverman in the supporting cast, Cooper captures bygone eras with distinctive visual touches. He'll shoot dialogue shots from the distance, making the settings in Manhattan, Tanglewood or the Bernstein home in upstate New York as important as the words. The cinematography, following “Oppenheimer's" lead in black and white and color, is as lavish and bold as the musical score.

The Bernsteins' Park Avenue duplex overlooking Central Park also became a hub of activity, awash in upscale liberal cocktail parties brilliantly immortalized by Tom Wolfe in “Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers.” Here as on the podium, Bernstein was always “on,” always performing, the center of attention, sucking all the air out of the room.

Considering that he essentially launched his career as the pretty boy in “The Hangover's” hapless quartet, Bradley Cooper continues to demonstrate himself as a consummate artist on both sides of the camera. “Maestro” nicely follows his remake of “A Star Is Born,” which also probed the tortured soul of music making.

Creative genius, it seems, isn't always a gift for the handful of humans who possess it. In Bernstein's case it felt like an unachievable responsibility, a curse as much as a blessing.

As a member of the audience that grew up watching Bernstein's Young People's Concerts in the '50s, he remains a mythic figure, more demigod than human to me. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are about my age. Similar feelings my have prompted them to sign on as producers of Cooper's film.

Lydia Tár also grew up watching the Young People's Concerts, which shaped her ambition to become a conductor herself. Lydia, of course, wasn't real, but the brilliant creation of Cate Blanchett and writer-director Todd Fields in last year's similarly themed “Tár.” Ironically, it's Lydia rather than Lenny who is ultimately the more compelling screen character. His very human failings don't fit nearly as neatly into three-act structure as her fictional flaws did.

True, Leonard Bernstein's artistic genius achieved immortality in his lifetime.

But sucking all the air out of the room gets annoying after a while.