Maestro Review: Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein Biopic Is Artful & Fractured

Maestro begins with a quote from its real-life subject, Leonard Bernstein: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” As a mission statement, I struggled to reconcile it with the film that followed. With 2018’s A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper showed himself to be a filmmaker of striking emotional clarity, and this quality carried over to his second feature — I did not feel like I was being left with questions. Only after thinking about it for some time did I realize Cooper’s epigraph does not describe his movie, but his Bernstein. This is not a biopic of an artist so much as a human artwork, capturing the many questions he provokes and the contradictory answers that define him. Seeing it in this light has helped me appreciate the project as a whole more than I did at the time, when it spoke to me only in pieces.