The Real Leonard Bernstein: Reflections about Lenny and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (Web Exclusive)
by Christopher Foss

Produced by Fred Berner, Bradley Cooper, Amy Durning, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg; directed by Bradley Cooper; screenplay by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer; cinematography by Matthew Libatique; edited by Michelle Tesoro; production design by Kevin Thompson; music by Leonard Bernstein; starring Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Michael Urie, Gideon Glick, Miriam Shor, and Alexa Swinton. B&W and color, 129 min., 2023. A Netflix release.

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a film about Leonard Bernstein and his marriage to Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, now nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, has created quite a stir—first and foremost because as director and actor, Cooper went to such extraordinary lengths to perfect the role of Bernstein, both in manner and physical appearance. The screenplay, which Cooper co-wrote with Josh Singer, has garnered praise for the exceptional dialogue and byplay between Lenny and Felicia. Thanks to cinematographer Matthew Libatique, the film is lush and innovative and a pleasure to watch. Sound and makeup are also top flight. No surprise, then, that the majority of reviews are full of praise. 

There are the Hollywood extravaganza moments with Lenny and Felicia at their grand Connecticut vacation home and capacious Upper West Side Dakota apartment, not to mention the ecstatic moments in which Lenny conducts to the delight of large audiences. Then there is the film’s faithful rendering of mid-twentieth-century elegant yet cozy New York, as well as the idyllic Tanglewood in Massachusetts, where the Boston Symphony, guest musicians, students, and fans gather for summer festivals. Lenny’s worlds, both public and private, though distinct, manage to come together convincingly as events move through this panoply. Cooper’s great direction, the fine acting, cinematography, and sound—mostly Bernstein’s music—are a pleasure for audiences to take in, whether in a theater or via streaming on Netflix.

The Bernstein family, now composed of Lenny and Felicia’s children Jamie, Alexander, and Nina, are vocal supporters of Cooper’s directorial vision and passionate portrayal of their father. They also have heralded Singer, expressing their enthusiasm for his work with Cooper on the storyline, largely based on Jamie Bernstein’s memoir, Famous Father Girl—a sensitive and beautifully written remembrance of the Bernsteins’ world from inside the family bubble. Nevertheless, even after watching Maestro carefully, and despite the strokes of directorial and screenwriting brilliance, along with superlative performances (especially by Carey Mulligan as Felicia), something is decidedly “off” about the film’s approach to its subject.

Yes, Maestro features this supernova of a musician—a fine composer of major contributions to the twentieth-century classical repertoire and, just as famously, the composer of West Side Story. Bernstein was also the conductor who transformed how classical music was heard and understood by old and new audiences alike. Lenny was magnificent in showing how classical music could be appreciated on multiple levels, many of which were antithetical to traditional modes of approaching the art form. While this all sounds fine, Maestro, in truth, is rife with complication—of both the good and bad kind.  

One complication is that the film is about two Lennys—the world-famous celebrity conductor-composer who was truly in love with music and music-making, as well as the other Lenny, who was destructively egotistical and deeply conflicted, as we see in the many scenes that delve into his troubled but ultimately loving marriage to Felicia. While there’s nothing unusual about presenting the cliché trope of the outwardly successful but tortured artist, it can potentially veer off track. 

The focus on the marriage, which Cooper calls “complicated, fascinating and inspiring” is assumed to be at the core of who Lenny is—and, in this way, man and musician are one. It’s an assumption that’s repeated in a number of interviews with Cooper, Singer, and producer Kristie Macosko Krieger. “We knew this was the way to tell the story…of Leonard Bernstein’s life,” Krieger explains. Perhaps true, if you want to see Leonard Bernstein’s life as a mashup of ups and downs, full of moments of deep pain and profound happiness, failure and success, yes, publicly, but above all as a husband and father. Singer tells an interviewer that Bernstein’s accomplishments, his career as perhaps the greatest American conductor, are “pretty much documented.” What’s not well-documented, according to Singer, is Bernstein’s private life. “What we were trying to do is tell a story that no one knew.” Lenny’s life on this score has in fact, for better or worse, been extensively documented in quite a few biographies, some of them unauthorized and, understandably, painful to Lenny for a variety of reasons.

What the screenwriters don’t seem to grasp, however, is that the choice before them is not a choice between public or private Lenny. In fact, one might say there are three “lives” of Lenny—public, private, and then, his life as an artist, which is the most private life of all. Of course, these lives all mesh to a degree, and some part of the artist’s journey will be lonely, even when creativity is collaborative. 

Because I had the privilege of growing up knowing Lenny and Felicia and their wonderful kids—my father was composer, conductor, and pianist Lukas Foss who was a colleague and lifelong friend of Lenny—I was a bit anxious before watching Maestro on the big screen at the New York Film Festival’s spotlight gala, which was an amazing experience. Would the film be canned pablum or something I couldn’t relate to, especially since I had known the family? Would it have the hoped-for brilliance (no, not movie magic) to capture the life of Lenny and his family in a way that I could recognize? It was a world I revered because I so enjoyed the times that I found myself in the couple’s presence. My father, who first met Lenny at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia when they were both youngsters, cared deeply for the man. They both studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and they both admired Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky who was a mentor and father-figure for both musicians.

My father performed with Lenny many times in his life—often at the piano, under Lenny’s baton. They formed a mutual admiration society, even though, especially in the early days, there may have been some friendly competition. I wouldn’t have known about that, because my father—perhaps more interested in the musical avant-garde than Lenny was—revered Lenny as a complete musician. He made it clear to me that Lenny’s forays into the Broadway musical world had not diminished him in the slightest (as it did in the eyes of some stodgy music academics).  

Whenever I had the chance to see Lenny and his family, I would be delighted. I liked hanging out with Alexander (we were about the same age). And being around Lenny was never boring. He was, of course, mesmerizing as a conductor and, in a different way, when at home at his dinner table in the Dakota. He was also full of sage advice for the teenager I was phasing into—full of kindness and yes, as always, unbelievably charismatic. Felicia and my mother, painter Cornelia Foss, were also quite close, talking frequently over the phone.

I will never forget the last time I saw Felicia. I believe she had just left an appointment with her doctor, perhaps a psychiatrist who was treating her for the emotional hell that accompanies cancer, particularly terminal cancer. I happened to live in the neighborhood where we ran into one another. She couldn’t have been kinder and more wonderful. Even as I detected tears in her eyes, she was thoughtful enough to ask me about school and how life was going generally. Those were a very sweet few minutes that I never forgot—that memory is comforting to think of to this day. Imagine! Felicia had tried to make me feel both at ease and relaxed about, perhaps, unsettling things that were happening in my life at the time. Her taking an interest in my life for a few minutes—when she was going through hell—touched me deeply.

I mention all of this at some length because, yes, how could I be totally objective watching or writing about Maestro when I had such fond memories of my occasional encounters with the Bernsteins? As the film began, I shed any instinct to be judgmental. I realized that Cooper had taken on a heavy weight in making such a film about Lenny’s life, and in doing so, worked hard to get it as right as he could. I thought about the film for a long while after the screening because, for some time, I didn’t understand why Maestro didn’t sit entirely right with me, despite being brilliant in so many ways. I like to think I would have had the same reaction had I never known the Bernsteins personally.

Much of Maestro no doubt reinforces my and others’ memory of Bernstein and his family, and I have no wish to nitpick in my assessment of the film. But for all of Lenny’s abundant talent showcased in Maestro, a fundamental element does not get its due. While Lenny’s immense heart, which fed all of his musical wisdom and passion, is very apparent, what isn’t so apparent is that that heart was fed also by an idealistic, aesthetic love. Whatever beauty and wonder (as well as pain) Felicia may have contributed to his life, this was not what fueled his prodigious talents. Moving as the melodrama is about Lenny and Felicia’s life together, in Maestro what unfortunately gets lost is Lenny’s true greatness as a human being and as an artist.

While the idea of illuminating “Lenny the maestro” by delving into the contradictory and conflicting qualities of his marriage has some validity, a problem emerges when director/actor Cooper can’t help but place Lenny front and center. It’s understandable. The great maestro gets top billing in this story and will be the central focus. And while Cooper’s instinct to meld that focus with the complications of married life is interesting, it fails to fully highlight the expansive love Lenny felt for all things true and beautiful. Most problematic of all is that the drama of interlocking characters, Cooper as Bernstein and Mulligan as Felicia, fails to do justice to Lenny the artist. Cooper might claim that Lenny the man, his demons, his love for Felicia and family do link up to what made Lenny who and what he was. In truth, such a marital drama—nuanced and full of edifying moments—is nevertheless at odds, rather than in sync, with Lenny’s core being.  

The real drama of Lenny’s life did not include a seamless connection between his marriage and his immense artistic gift. The two were ultimately and irremediably at odds. Although Maestro gets at several majestic and uncanny moments wherein marriage and art come together, these two polarities cannot be entirely integrated, despite Cooper’s attempts. The deeply private, lonely aspects of “communicating with the world” as a musical artist, whose lingua franca is poetry, simply do not align with the public and rather prosaic world of celebrity—or for that matter with the private world of the deeply emotional and intimate connection with the people Lenny loved. Had the writers sensed that impossibility, adding some dimension of the artist's mystery into Maestro's drama the film might have given audiences a more informed, more thrilling portrait of Lenny. 

Even without that “mystery,” Maestro is nevertheless an artful film. In one noteworthy scene Felicia and Lenny are sitting alone together during a rehearsal of Jerome Robbins’s ballet, Fancy Free, for which Bernstein wrote the music. Here is one instance where Felicia and Lenny’s relationship intertwines marvelously and surrealistically with the film’s actual focus—rendering a simultaneously personal and artistic portrait of Bernstein. We hear the sumptuous, jazzy music, watch the sailors on stage dancing with athletic abandon as the camera pans to Felicia and Lenny watching. Lenny—shown earlier in the film with his lover David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) as Robbins and he are working on the ballet—is visibly thrilled by all of the male sexiness on display, with one dancer even winking at Lenny. As we watch Lenny, we see Felicia sitting by him, looking miserable. It’s an astonishing moment, quite a dexterous merging of music, character, and plot that otherwise is rare in the film, and when it does occur, not nearly so artfully as here.

Another brilliant scene of a different kind—almost a tragicomic moment—occurs when Felicia really lets Lenny have it. She unleashes a torrent of fury over Lenny’s selfishness connected to his less-than-discreet sexual pursuits. As this impassioned argument ensues in the living room of their New York Dakota apartment, a giant helium balloon of Snoopy (a favorite of the young Bernstein children) suddenly slices by, just outside their window during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The moment is one of great screenwriting and directing—that long, wide take reads as a vast gulf between the couple, as Mulligan and Cooper nail the timing of gesture, action, and words. The scene renders Lenny pathetic—a small shell of the man who, by contrast, is featured in so many other scenes glamorously and ecstatically bringing classical music to the masses. Cooper was obviously going for a moment of Lenny’s righteous humiliation.  

Our hero/celebrity attempts to respond to Felicia grandly, as if on stage in command of a performance, telling her, “My heart is open”—a comment that Felicia simply cannot accept, not after all the ups and downs of life with Lenny. Regardless of how you stage a film like Maestro, the truth is that if you make a great man look that small, like a cardboard celebrity “caught out” by his principled wife, no amount of posturing or of sublime conducting—such as that of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Theater in Cambridgeshire, England, another mesmerizing scene much later near the film’s end—will make Maestro cohere as a drama. Not even Felicia—smiling admiringly, proudly, lovingly in the wings at Ely, and later, after a passionate kiss, whispering to him, “There is no hate…There is no hate in your heart”—can bring the kind of unity and closure necessary to connect the flawed man with the astonishingly gifted conductor and artist.

In the Mahler scene, Cooper, as conductor Lenny, positively soars above the podium. However, the reason the scene is so powerful is that it is a wonderful live-action rendition of Mahler’s Second Symphony, Resurrection. In channeling Lenny channeling Mahler, it’s Mahler who winds up as the star of the scene. Cooper managed to put together a real performance at Ely Cathedral, not opting for the easy route of using Lenny’s actual 1973 recording of the Resurrection at Ely. This performance could have been a moment that harmonizes more than Lenny and Felicia, but also one that reconciles what Maestro misses—a portrait of Lenny the artist full of the essential integrity we see in flashes in his private life, but also one in which his artistry is defined by his love and commitment to music-making for the sake of the world. In other words, what’s extraordinary about Lenny—and particularly his artistry—is that he shows us truth and beauty are what’s essential, what’s most real in any of our lives.  

The detail and emotional commentary in the Jamie Bernstein memoir Famous Father Girl, by contrast, brings us into the private world of a very public figure. And while that portrait displays both the elemental and larger-than-life Lenny, it manages also to shine—even in the context of domestic life—with the man's unique artistic integrity. The book is balanced and forthright about awkward, very private matters. It also provides a peek at Lenny—not just at home as host with Felicia at all sorts of fun, eccentric social events—but also at home, working. The result is that the not-so-private, mostly flamboyant, public Lenny becomes illuminated by Lenny at his core—caring, driven, and, yes, narcissistic—but in a way that was passionate and not all celebrity-besotted, but informed, rather, by intensely held feeling and belief. 

Jamie doesn’t attempt to give us a cliché Lenny whose chaotic, Dionysian energy as artist is transcendent or entirely remote from the hard-working family man and husband who occasionally had to extricate himself from domesticity, from his life with Felicia. And yet somehow the two Lennys are one in Jamie’s hands—as well in Felicia’s mind. Maybe in reading between the lines of Jamie's memoir, Cooper and Singer might have gleaned a bit more from Lenny's married life with Felicia—more that wasn't so distinct from artist/composer Lenny or from Lenny, the conductor atop his podium.

Audiences are treated in Maestro to Mulligan's mesmerizing portrait of Felicia as one who manages to be a grounding influence on a man who could destroy as well as create. In this sense, she is Lenny’s antagonist, a powerful demon in her own right, who also manages to make Lenny love and need her. This heroine's dynamic and heartbreaking role harks back to Greek tragedy and this is apparent even in Jamie's telling of the Bernsteins’ story in which the picture of intimacy she draws augments and illuminates Felicia’s devastating “agon.” Maestro falters on this level. While Felicia is definitely a huge part of Lenny’s world, Maestro relegates her nevertheless to the essentially ancillary role of “wife of the artist.”

Cooper and Singer see Lenny as someone committed yet less than “united” in marriage with Felicia, although given the ending of Maestro, as Felicia is dying, one gets the sense, thankfully, of the quasi-spiritual intimacy between the two that kept their bond alive over the years. Mulligan stands tall as Felicia—as did her real-life counterpart, although the latter was quite petite. Felicia was indeed a ballast for Lenny, the man, and the composer-conductor, as well as a fiercely protective materfamilias when it came to the kids. Yet her significant stature in all these contexts could never, as it appears Cooper hoped, match Lenny's for Maestro's audience.

One fanciful thought: what if the script had been written so that Jamie provided the voice-over narration? Maybe this would have softened the confining intimacy that defines Lenny and Felicia in Maestro and thereby opened it up to include the dimension it mostly lacks. Perhaps with Jamie as narrator, Lenny might have been granted the extraordinary magnanimity of spirit he possessed alongside his fame and been truer to the Lenny who, after all, had been a tremendous artistic and cultural force generally. One wonders if Cooper and Singer considered this.

Another fanciful thought: what if Cooper had not occupied the starring role? Cooper’s focus on the good, bad, and ugly of the marriage surely reveals a psychologically complicated Lenny that some may not have been aware of, much less understood. Mulligan as Felicia is a near-perfect foil to Lenny as chaos personified. But she doesn’t contain that chaos, fueled as it is by so many psychological demons—Lenny’s hatred of his small-time beauty-salon-owner father, hatred of himself for not hewing to the script he thinks his life should have followed, namely one devoted more to composing than conducting. These twin hatreds crowd Lenny’s soul and are the source of his addiction to adulation, not to mention to scotch and cigarettes; they also color his queerness (whether it was bisexuality or homosexuality is up for grabs). One also wishes for a bit more of Cooper’s soul commingling with Lenny’s in the conducting scenes, rather than sporting an obsession with verisimilitude, thus allowing audiences to be treated to more of Lenny’s irrepressible humanity laced with spirituality originating from his Jewish roots. If Cooper had hired another actor to play Lenny, the resulting crucial distance might have yielded a character that’s less “a character,” thereby tapping more of Lenny’s soul—that unique, multifaceted musical creativity and essential artistry.

Cooper’s effort to be Lenny, to portray every feature of Lenny’s character with such exacting verisimilitude, has the perverse effect of making himself, Bradley—not Lenny—the maestro in this movie. As brilliant as Cooper’s effort is, or as lifelike as his Lenny seems, whether in private or in public, Cooper’s portrayal, arch and angular (in a way that Lenny never was) undermines the brilliant attributes that made Lenny so amazing, and yes, famous. Cooper gives us celebrity in abundance, but the magic of this ubercharismatic man who projected and attracted so much love (both for himself and for music) is strangely attenuated. While that all-embracing spirit is there in a number of moments, it is not Maestro’s primary motif. Cooper can give us a philandering, homosexual Lenny, and a Lenny who could be insensitive and quite cruel to his wife and family. Lost in the mix of scurrilousness is Lenny’s extraordinary largesse.  

Yes, it was difficult to be openly gay back in the Sixties and Seventies, and coping with the social stigma was going to be rough on Felicia, even though she’s on record in published letters as “accepting” Lenny for who he was, despite his living “a double life.” Felicia’s tragedy is that she accepts the double life so long as Lenny remains discreet—which was not realistic. But she thinks she can meet this challenge, as she says in her letter to Lenny, “without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the Leonard Bernstein altar.”

But Maestro prioritizes delineating Lenny the superstar—his days of brilliant early success, followed by his early life with Felicia, first in Hollywood happy-go-lucky black-and-white, and then in muted color, in which the second half of the film is awash. This art-film effort at bifurcation via color may be seen as a bravura move on Cooper’s part, bathing Lenny’s brilliant rise to stardom in a Hollywood-style romanticism. It’s an arty, daring tactic, but one the film doesn’t need—even if Lenny’s big break as a conductor came at him like “something out of the movies,” when he answers a call from a New York Philharmonic representative who tells him he will fill in as conductor for Philharmonic conductor Bruno Walter that day. In this early scene, shot in black and white, the camera pulls back to reveal Lenny in bed with a man when the call comes in. Lenny (“elatedly” doesn’t describe it) leaps from the bed and assumes an ecstatic pose—his legs, wide apart, his hands raised as if he were ready for the downbeat—his frame silhouetted by the light pouring in as he opens the curtains of the large casement window. A few frames later, he’s on the Carnegie Hall stage carefully raising his hand to give the actual downbeat. Cut to post-concert plaudits from Philharmonic officials on stage, with audience members looking thrilled. It’s noteworthy that, despite this treatment, Felicia will later shred the “gift from God” narrative—qualifying the film’s own aesthetic choices—by explaining to Lenny that it isn’t his big break at Carnegie Hall that made him who he is: if that hadn’t happened, something else would have brought him into the artistic spotlight.

Some critics have remarked that Maestro gives the two characters “equal weight.” It would be nice if that were true, in the sense that Felicia would then be resurrected as Lenny’s equal partner. After all, while she lived much of her life in the spotlight, a good portion of it included waiting in the wings, both literally at Lenny’s concerts, as in the crucial Ely reconciliation scene, and figuratively in so many other ways. Mulligan conjures up a Felicia that rings totally true in its allegiance to the real-life Felicia—a performance of smiles, frowns, and expressions of disbelief in response to Lenny and as attempted counterweight to the outsized celebrity he embodied. She is understated, speaking worlds of thought just with her eyes, always remaining exquisitely poised, just as Felicia was in real life.

Felicia may have been conceived as a central character, but in Maestro, as in her life, she can’t always take center stage like Lenny does. This is the film’s failure, not that of Mulligan, who comes close to saving Maestro. Felicia’s sense of probity is powerful. Mulligan “recreates” Felicia as a loving and steadying force, who, in her own right, masterfully creates a buffer for Lenny’s puerile antics. She almost succeeds in countervailing Lenny’s emotional recklessness, his hurtful, flamboyant ways. While Felicia refrains from suffocating the man she loves and admires to no end, she does rein him in to some degree and call him to account when his unartful “wild man” escapades go too far. The imbalance of Maestro’s representation of the two—despite its creators stated desire to delineate a kind of equality—is a serious problem for the film, one that ultimately renders it an unsettled and unsettling production at odds with the possibility of presenting a well-rounded, faithful portrait of Bernstein or his marriage. 

No matter how hard the film tries to provide a weighty Scenes from a Marriage tableau featuring both the lows and highs of Lenny and Felicia’s story, it fails to anchor Lenny’s story. In fact, it distracts from the depth that Lenny’s character could have been given if the focus had shifted. Maestro, instead, showcases Lenny from multiple angles—dramatic scenes of extraordinary conducting, Lenny’s tormented ego, his torment of Felicia—only providing what astronomers refer to as “parallax.” The central feature of Lenny — his musical genius — is displaced somewhat by the scenes-from-a-marriage format, which, as mentioned fails to provide Felicia with equal weight, despite the screenplay’s writers claiming to do just that . Lenny does indeed need to be contextualized to be understood. Felicia is appropriately and effectively part of that context. It’s not that Lenny needs an even greater spotlight than he’s afforded in Maestro; it’s that, rather than being shown constantly squaring off with Felicia, more emphasis might have been placed on Lenny the  artist desperate to expand his range in music and the quantity of pieces composed. We know that Lenny’s struggle along these lines was acute.

Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard Lectures, which he titled “The Unanswered Question,” after the title of a glorious Charles Ives piece, contain a line that caught Cooper/Singer’s eye, and which Cooper uses as an epigraph to his film: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

It is a powerful statement, but one that I think the film misinterprets. Maestro wants to make Lenny—the man and artist—a work of art, thinking this will, in turn, make the film a work of art. Lenny and all of his contradictions, however, are not themselves interesting as “art.” Felicia wrote to Lenny, complaining that she had been left alone to contend with the “bloody mess” that was their “‘connubial’ life,” but she then does an about-face, saying, “I’ve done a lot of thinking and have decided that it’s not such a mess after all.” Life is messy. Painful adjustments are often necessary. But Maestro gives itself over to the grand idea that somehow Lenny’s life and art are one. It’s not as simple as that—although if you see Lenny’s life mostly as the career of a celebrity, then it will be. Art and artist are not, as other commentators (and Cooper!) claim, "inseparable." Nor is the obsessive portrayal of Lenny as a famous conductor with a messy life entirely off the mark. There’s a glaring fissure in Maestro, and it almost destroys the film, as deep characterological fissures almost destroyed Lenny the artist, although, yes, it’s fair to say that a fair bit of Lenny’s torment seeped into his entire world and to some degree certainly, shaped him as an artist.

Indeed, Mulligan as Felicia also does much to anchor Maestro as a movie with refined, soulful, and technically brilliant acting. She embodies love and sacrifice, as Felicia did in real life. She locates the truth of Felicia while Cooper misfires in his efforts to replicate Lenny. All the prosthetics Cooper deploys, as well as the endless mimicry, just don’t work to reveal an authentic Lenny in-the-round.

In wrapping her arms around her chosen love, a grenade with a loose pin, Felicia thinks she will contain most of any shrapnel let loose by his wild side. As painfully delusional as her approach was, Felicia, as played by Mulligan, is in some way redeemed by Leonard Bernstein’s true legacy: the loving nature at his core and his continual yearning to share the beauty of the music he loves and makes. 

Cooper’s conducting of Mahler, after which Lenny and Felicia unite once more, loving and forgiving one another as they come together in a passionate embrace, is one of Maestro’s truly fine scenes. We get the private, conflicted Lenny in sync with the profound artist who gave the world so much. It’s a shame that this extraordinary synchrony revealing the multi-dimensional, rather than “cardboard” Lenny, couldn’t have been realized more consistently in the film.

But Lenny’s pain, all the contradictions and conflicts baked into his love for Felicia, are not the essence of Leonard Bernstein. His essence is his integrity—the artist’s unifying force, rather than a bifurcated one that’s trapped by demons and the strictures of a complicated marriage. As true and twisted, bizarre, magical, and loving as his marriage to Felicia might have been, it was Lenny’s integrity—the part of him epitomized and revealed mostly through his artistry—rather than simply through his nontraditional yet loving marriage to Felicia, that is in short supply in Maestro, and therefore makes the film less than it might have been. Bradley Cooper brings so much brilliance to Maestro, and yet it remains a misdirected portrait and ultimately a flawed film.

Christopher Foss is a New York-based writer (speechwriting, poetry, articles on art and politics). He has produced and directed documentaries about artists—including the painter Larry Rivers and a work-in-progress on composer/conductor/pianist Lukas Foss. He is also a fine art photographer whose work has been shown in New York and on Long Island.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2