Review Roundup: Critics Weigh In on Bradley Cooper's MAESTRO

Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein film starring Bradley Cooper, who also co-wrote and directed the feature, is out now in theaters.

Maestro is Cooper's second film following his acclaimed remake of A Star Is Born. The film will be released on Netflix on December 20.

The cast also includes Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Josh Hamilton, Scott Ellis, Gideon Glick, Sam Nivola, Alexa Swinton, and Miriam Shor.

Maestro is a towering and fearless love story chronicling the lifelong relationship between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. A love letter to life and art, Maestro at its core is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.

The film is produced by Martin Scorsese, Bradley Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Fred Berner, Amy Durning, and Kristie Macosko Krieger.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

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Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “Maestro” is a fast-paced chronicle of towering highs, crushing lows and artistic milestones, most delivered in a personal key. Cooper packs a lot in without overexplaining the era or its titans (Brian Klugman plays the composer Aaron Copland, one of Bernstein’s closest friends); years pass in an eyeblink, events slip by obliquely or go unmentioned. Cooper is more interested in feelings than happenings, though part of what makes the movie pop and gives it currency is how he complicates the familiar Great Man of History template.

Peter Travers, Good Morning America: You'll hear complaints that "Maestro" is too much about the man, too little about the art. But who wants biopic tropes when Cooper and Mulligan are offering a triumphant labor of love that reveals just how Bernstein found the music that made him dance.

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: Cooper, who plays Bernstein under some controversial prosthetics, has opted for even more high style than he did in A Star Is Born. The first half or so of the film is in black and white, in a square aspect ratio, as Cooper quickly traces Bernstein’s rise to fame and then more deliberately captures scenes of Bernstein and Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) falling for one another amid a ghost-lit theater and the rolling hills of the Berkshires. They first meet at a smoky, song-filled house party and are instantly enamored of each other’s smarts and openness, their mutual willingness to feel and want in front of one another. These artists from comfortable backgrounds are not living any sort of pinched, mid-century stiffness, denied their ambitions. They are active creatives drawn to a shared flame. And thus, together, they burn—in a good way, for a while.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: Amplifying its force with thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be grossly over-simplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his “beard.” But Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a unique union, fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable — even when it’s broken.

Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone: And all the rank discourse is a shame because Maestro, Cooper’s Bernstein film, is made with such reverence and love for the man that after seeing the picture, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, there will be no doubt in your mind that this is not just a worthy tribute to one of the greatest figures in the American musical canon, but also one of the finest films of the year.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker: Strange to say, “Maestro” isn’t really about music. (Nor was “Tár.”) The whole thing may be drenched in music, but Cooper is inspired less by the creative source of the sound than by the emotional destination to which it flows—that is, Felicia. 

Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire: Nose aside, “Maestro” is a technical triumph in terms of checking all the boxes of multihyphenate-ism — Cooper funnels himself into the project at every creative level — but this handsomely made Oscar-tailored package actually belongs to another person entirely, and that would be Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife of nearly four decades, Felicia Montealegre. She was both the adoring but also the suffering end of a lavender marriage in which she enabled Bernstein to have affairs with an endless train of men (including some of his proteges) as long as he was home on the weekends and didn’t let his sex life impact their three children. To play the sparky Costa Rica-born actress, Mulligan puts on a kind of Transatlantic accent and later a deep, worn-in inner graveliness by the end of her life, cut off by cancer in 1978. Mulligan is wonderful and never overwhelming or overstating in portraying a woman who never set aside her own ambitions for the sake of her husband — even while having to stand by in the wings of his greatness.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety: In “Maestro,” playing the legendary American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper has a light in his eye — a glow of merriment and mischief, of gleeful cosmopolitan desire. His Lenny is a prodigy, a prankster, a seducer, a monk of creative devotion and, through it all, a man of epic contradiction. In public, he tends toward the proper and stentorian; in private, he’s recklessly exuberant enough to give new — or maybe old — meaning to the word gay. He’s a layered soul, a quality that extends from his professional life, where he’s a reverent conductor of the classics and a jubilant composer of Broadway musicals (as well as a serious composer who longs to be thought of as classic), to his personal life, where he’s an ardent hedonist, unapologetically attracted to men, as well as a devoted husband and family man.

Pete Hammond, Deadline: Again though Cooper clearly had no interest in a soup-to-nuts look at the life of Leonard Bernstein, it was instead the life force that made him the complicated genius and complex husband and father that he was. This is only Cooper’s second outing as a director after 2018’s hit A Star Is Born, but it is the work of a very assured filmmaker bringing a strong vision to the screen. Interestingly the sumptously produced and long gestating film was originally going to be a directing vehicle for Martin Scorsese, and then Steven Spielberg – both remain as producers – but seems almost fated to land in Cooper’s hands not only as its title star, but in its writing (collaborating with initial writer Josh Singer) and director.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: As for Cooper himself, he has an eerie likeness of the great man, particularly in showing Bernstein’s scary and rapacious upper set of teeth, grinningly revealed as Bernstein flings his head ecstatically back at the podium. Perhaps it’s inevitable that such an accomplished and studied impersonation should be a little narcissistic, but as ever with Cooper, the pure theatrical technique is very commanding – though there are moments when Lenny is bashing away at the piano keyboard, that Cooper looks a tiny bit like Michael Douglas playing Liberace.

Nicholas Barber, BBC: Still, Maestro is not just the Bradley Cooper show. In the credits he takes second billing, ceding the top spot to Mulligan. The choice doesn't really make sense: Bernstein is undoubtedly the central character. But Mulligan's performance as the loyal but tortured Felicia is a sparkling tour de force, especially in the lengthy, complicated scenes in which the dialogue overlaps with documentary-like naturalism, but is also enunciated with the precision of the most sophisticated screwball comedy. She has never been better. Apparently there is some debate as to whether a woman should be addressed as a "Maestro" or a "Maestra", but whichever term you prefer, Mulligan definitely qualifies.

Ben Croll, The Wrap: As is often the case with actors-turned-directors, Cooper is generous with his cast – including himself. “Maestro” throws up plenty of meaty scenes, with breakdowns, breakups, teary reconciliations and grim medical diagnoses in high supply. While Cooper enters the film as a spark plug, and only turns up the electricity, Mulligan finds time to shine outside Lenny’s orbit, delivering a terrific, introspective monologue as the now middle-aged Felicia reflects upon her own agency in a marriage to a man who never hid his sexual interests. “Who was lying to who?” she wonders.

Stephanie Zacharek, TIME: Yet this is always a love story: Cooper and Mulligan play out a devotion that survived whatever may have played out in one bedroom or another; there's a tender carnality between them. At the same time, Maestro is clear about Leonard’s attraction to, and his life with, other men. This is as far from a conversion-therapy fairytale as you can get. It’s more about loving people as they really are, sometimes the hardest task any of us is called upon to do. Since the 1960s, each generation has loudly celebrated its right to sexual freedom. But it’s completely possible to fall in love with someone who doesn’t fit neatly into your own zone of sexual orientation. And one person’s notion of sexual freedom can mean another person’s heartbreak. Maestro faces that truth squarely.

Caspar Salman, The Daily Beast: What is it, then, that lifts off in Maestro? Partly it’s the film’s sheer weirdness. At its heart are two annoying characters, who seemingly bond over both being deeply annoying people: There is a great deal of complicit laughter between them over unfunny things; there is a sort of theatricality to both, and the film is intelligent in the way it shows the immediate harmony of this pairing, the way they have the same rhythm, dictating their impulses, body language, fits and starts of conversation, and private jokes.

Geoffrey Macnab, Independant: It can’t be said that the script, which Cooper co-wrote with Josh Singer, is especially taut. The storytelling is choppy and episodic. Scenes are strung together in a sometimes random fashion. However, Carey Mulligan is magnificent as the musician’s South American wife, Felicia, a successful actor in her own right. She a warm, glamorous figure who mothers Bernstein even as he betrays her, and looks after his wardrobe (one reason why he becomes more dapper as the film goes on). Mulligan (who looks certain to win awards nominations) captures her character’s pragmatism, imperiousness and, in the latter scenes, her extreme vulnerability.

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Watch the trailer for Maestro here:

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