Maestro

In selected cinemas and available on Netflix

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro isn’t the most groundbreaking film you’ll see this year. In fact, cineastes who have grown tired of the ‘prestige biopic’ may find this leisurely paced picture not to their tastes, as it possesses almost all of the hallmarks one might associate with such a film. Nonetheless, you cannot deny Cooper’s ambition as a director, which sees him here take on a project that is altogether different from his crowd-pleasing debut A Star is Born, nor can you fault the quality of acting that is on display from both him and his co-star, the irrepressibly talented Carey Mulligan.

Framed in gorgeous monochrome by Matthew Libatique, Maestro recounts the life of American composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) through the lens of his complicated marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Mulligan), a relationship that was built on loving foundations but made complex by the sexual proclivities of the former. In that sense, it is not entirely dissimilar to Ira Sachs’ Passages, another excellent film from this year which also explored the emotional toll of allowing a prodigious artist to indulge their fleeting desires.

Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer do not thoroughly examine the duality of Bernstein’s life as an openly gay man living within the confines of a seemingly idyllic hetrosexual existence, which does makes Maestro something of a missed opportunity. However, in choosing to focus their narrative on the relationship between Bernstein and Montealegre, they elicit one of the year’s standout performances from Mulligan, who reaches another level of dramatic eminence with a turn that oscillates from being quietly affecting to utterly devastating. On this evidence, she must be a strong contender to sweep up when the awards season commences.

Cooper is also often mesmerising as Bernstein, particularly in the film’s conducting sequences, which evokes memories of Whiplash by making the act of playing music seem like the exhilarating high-wire act that only the most accomplished of players would know it to be. With the late composer’s music providing the film with its score, this is a fitting tribute to the life and times of a contradictory figure and his rare talent.