Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan shine in Cooper's ambitious and sincere drama of Leonard Bernstein's life, proving the director is to be taken seriously, writes Nicholas Barber.
just a year after the last one, Todd Field's Tár . And it takes courage to direct a film that was due to be made, at various times, by Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, both of whom stayed on as producers. But Maestro confirms what was suggested by Cooper's directorial debut,. He has sky-high ambitions, and he has the technical virtuosity and big-hearted sincerity to fulfil those ambitions with flair.
One bold aspect is that the film's timeline spans several decades, and Cooper adjusts its style to suit the period. It begins in 1943 when the 25-year-old Bernstein is a last-minute stand-in at Carnegie Hall for the New York Philharmonic's indisposed conductor. With no time to rehearse, he nonetheless wields the baton with such brilliance that, well, a star is born.
The early stages of their romance are presented as a black-and-white 1940s backstage melodrama, a whirlwind of fast talking, hectic pacing and wild dream sequences. It can be too frantic for its own good, and it doesn't dodge every cliché of a Hollywood biopic: sometimes you're at risk of being deafened by the clatter of all the names being dropped. But the pastiching is done with such verve that it's hard to resist.
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