Julia Hamilton loves Bradley Cooper’s take on Leonard Bernstein.
This is not just any old biopic. This is Bradley Cooper’s stunning take on the towering cultural figure of Leonard Bernstein – co-written and directed by Cooper, to boot.
Maestro covers miles of chronological ground, beginning with an aged, white-haired Lenny armed with two indispensable items, a piano and a cigarette, being filmed in his apartment while he plays and talks to camera. I don’t think there’s a single scene in the entire movie in which Bernstein is not smoking and Felicia Montealegre Cohn (Carey Mulligan) is almost as bad. When she is diagnosed with breast cancer that has spread from her lung, the shock is not the diagnosis but the fact that she’s got away with it for so long.
