This review contains spoilers for Maestro.

In the 1940s, a young Jewish man (Bradley Cooper) with dreams of orchestra conducting gets the big break of his career – the lead conductor of the New York Philharmonic falls ill, and this young man, Leonard Bernstein, steps in to take his place. American music would never be the same. Maestro follows the life of Bernstein, charting his early days up until his old age. Despite this set-up, it’s arguable that the genuinely moving story at the heart of the film is that of Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, thanks to Carey Mulligan’s astounding embodiment of hope and turmoil.

Indeed, Mulligan is easily the most vital point in the film. Cooper, doubling as director, co-creates a remarkable performance with her. From her first moment in the film, Mulligan elevates Felicia to a heart-on-her-sleeve woman who maintains composure. Her transatlantic accent, befitting of an actress of Felicia’s time period, lilts through her lines to deliver an enigmatic, poised vulnerability.

But the protagonist’s story itself gets lost in a maze of cliches. Leonard is queer and has had sexual encounters with both men and women but seems to prefer extramarital affairs with men. Although at first Felicia is understanding of his complicated sexuality, her patience wanes. Soon, her husband’s sexuality becomes the antagonist of the story, and the film presents Bernstein’s queerness as a failing that ruins his opportunity for a traditional, “wholesome” life with a woman.

Although the facts about Bernstein’s affairs may be true, why does the film hyperfocus on his tumultuous personal life and bury his creative genius? I finished the film asking why his story is worth telling if the movie insists on framing it this way. In a conversation with fellow Screen Speck staff writer Ana de Castro, she mentioned hoping the film would spend more time on Bernstein’s work. It doesn’t. I don’t know as much about him as a creator as I know about him as a supposed self-sabotr. 

Biopics need not be pedagogical; they can move us through the robust emotional journey of the figure on which they focus, but I still want to walk away from a movie about a historical queer man with knowledge about him beyond his relationships. Yet even these are not drawn with a sense of cinematic interest. The always-engaging Matt Bomer, who plays Bernstein’s first onscreen lover, disappears after a point in the film, and Bernstein’s new interest, Tommy (Gideon Glick), disappears into the wallpaper. We know nothing meaningful about him. His presence is there to torture Felicia and, through her, us.

I am at a loss for how to read one of the film’s final images. Bernstein has just finished instructing a young conductor on how to get the performance he wants from an orchestra. The scene vacates the music hall and escapes into a 1980s nightclub pulsing with music and lights. There, the young conductor dances closely, sensually with Bernstein. Then, we see Bernstein by himself, taking up the screen, hands thrown into the air, enraptured by the music. Is this a shot of a man taking advantage of his student and failing to “act his age”? Or can we read it as an exultant, exuberant moment? Considering the entire film has boxed in Bernstein’s queerness, ending it with student abuse, it’s hard to see this story ending with any closure. Perhaps this is an attempt to evoke the inscription at the start of the film, a summation of “the tension between contradictory answers” works of art can provoke. But it doesn’t land. The tension is a narrative confusion rather than a thought-provoking conclusion.

In 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, there’s an unforgettable scene that pairs Freddie Mercury’s (Rami Malek) studio performance of “Another One Bites the Dust” with superimposed images of him at a party surrounded by eroticized men. In this dreamscape, he disappears into a backroom with a man. The song choice and imagery paired together suggest that gay sex equates to destruction, to a particular earthy demise mired in dirt-eating. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this film while watching Maestro.

Ultimately, it feels like a 2-hour long argument for how queerness threatens the nuclear family. If only Bernstein hadn’t been so attracted to men and refused to sleep with them, he could have been faithful to his loving wife. He wouldn’t have to lie to his children. He would be more stable. Although the film doesn’t make the same equation of queer sex and doom as Bohemian Rhapsody does, there is a sense of self-sabotage and the vacancy of normative happiness at work. Maestro’s Bernstein ruined much of his personal life, and only when he cared for his wife in sickness was he an admirable man.

The best moments for Cooper are when Bernstein is conducting, and it gives us a glimpse of what this movie could have been if it focused a little more on what made the icon famous in the first place. Cooper is arresting as he weaves his arms through the air, punctuating the orchestra. He is having the time of his life as an actor, and it’s a shame these set pieces don’t have a better movie around them.

From a technical standpoint, some of the production design choices reminded me of last year’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths from Alejandro G. Iñárittu in its dedication to a dream-logical sense of place. The black and white start to the film especially embraced this, illustrating the feeling of falling in love and reaching one’s goals through a fluid mise-en-scene full of visual possibilities. Perhaps the rest of the film is meant to mirror the feeling of falling into a romantic rut, of harm done because it abandons its playful nature.

Biopics select their content and approaches carefully, borrowing from bases of truths and fabricating details (particularly and necessarily dialogue). Maestro is, of course, a series of choices, some cinematographically lovely and others unsettling. Often too brief and pieced together without a sense of connective muscle, each scene builds a fairytale beginning that fizzles into a thin thread of emotionally loaded images that don’t add up to a compelling life. You end this film feeling like Bernstein must have deserved better despite his faults. The New Yorker’s headline for their film review reads: “In ‘Maestro,’ Bradley Cooper Leaves Out All the Good Stuff.” And although I don’t know anything else about Bernstein besides his great acclaim, there must be plenty of compelling substance. We can tell better queer stories than this.

Rating: 4/10