Maestro is a biopic of Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper, who also writes, directs and produces), an American conductor/composer who wrote a lot of, you know, he was really famous. It says here he was the first American composer to receive international acclaim – I do movies, not music.

The project started its life way back in 2008 with Josh Singer, who had not yet received his first feature credit, attached to write and Martin Scorsese attached to direct. He eventually stepped down and the project fell to Steven Spielberg, who approached Bradley Cooper to star. When Spielberg left the project, Cooper took control, seizing the director’s chair and rewriting the screenplay, though Singer is still credited. Scorsese and Spielberg are still credited as producers along with Cooper and a whole slew of other middlemen bridging these relationships.

Scorsese’s participation is ironic, because Maestro feels a lot like a remake of his 1980 masterpiece Raging Bull. It’s unfortunate that Maestro releases into a world where Raging Bull already exists, because I would never, ever recommend the newer film over the classic, and there’s too much overlap for them to coexist.

Both films focus tightly on the main character’s marriage, almost at the expense of their careers, and they both portray their characters’ performances in brief, extremely surreal sequences that rely heavily on viewers already knowing the context. They both result in a massive stream of cross-talking and arguing anchored by absolutely wonderful performances. The films are edited according to the same philosophy of staccato scenes of domestic life flowing and cross-cutting into public life, which is making the same point about their characters. They even feature similar individual cuts, at times.

They’re both black and white – Maestro has a timeskip at the 47:38 mark when Bernstein’s wife, actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), starts to get tired of him, after which it switches to bright, beautiful color photography, but it makes its impression during the black and white leg and exists in my memory as a black and white film. It also noticeably drags as it goes on, and I want to think of it as about 80% black and white because the 60 minute mark is where I start to want it to end. Raging Bull features a large timeskip much closer to its end and I watch that movie way too often, so that expectation on my part may have been conditioned.  

The main difference between the films is the focus on Bernstein’s bisexuality – the thing Montealegre is tired of is he keeps fucking men, as well as other women, and this is our entry point into the film’s thesis. Bernstein can’t only be one thing, and his sexual orientation is just the tip of that iceberg. He wants to be both married and single. He wants to lead both a public and a private life. At multiple points in the film, he’s asked whether he wants to be a conductor or a composer or any number of other roles he’s remembered as, and he rejects the choice, explaining at some length that the difference doesn’t exist for him. These explanations, which go from interview questions to fierce arguments with Montealegre, become the refrain of a highly musical film.

Another large difference is the cultural context in which a musician exists, how his fame spreads and whom it spreads to is different from that of a boxer, differences that reframe Maestro despite itself. This is most noticeable with the musical choices, which are all Bernstein compositions. I first saw Maestro in its qualifying theatrical run – the film is nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and for both leading roles – but on Netflix with the subtitles on, the film points out to viewers what they’re hearing and when it’s from, so that context rests closer to the surface.

Cooper was surely asked if he wanted to choose between writing, directing, producing or starring in Maestro, and his answer was surely similar – not even his answer, director Guillermo del Toro put these words in Cooper’s mouth after he starred for del Toro in Nightmare Alley and del Toro credited him for changing the course of the film with his directorial experience. This is Cooper’s second time directing himself after A Star is Born, and the process reversed – he wanted to direct A Star is Born and had to offer to star to push it through, and for Maestro, he was cast to star and took over directing duties to finish the project. That’s the real heroism of auteurism, the work to get your project out in front of audiences. Cooper performs for himself with the grace and assuredness of Eastwood or Welles, and though Maestro may not be a masterpiece, it’s always exactly the film Cooper wants it to be.

The treatment of Bernstein’s bisexuality becomes a mark against the film, though it would have been dishonest to water it down. As much affection as I’m sure everyone on the project has for bisexuals, prejudice has a history, and the base assumptions that Maestro works from are directly in line with the history of prejudice against bisexuals – the idea that they’re constantly cheating with partners of both sexes. Montealegre grows to resent the very things that attracted her to Bernstein in the first place. She married the slutty bi bitch specifically because of what a slutty bi bitch he is, but once they have kids it’s suddenly a problem.

Maybe it’s less a mark against the film and more a mark against Bernstein, because by all accounts, he really was that bitch.  

Raging Bull is perhaps the crown jewel of American cinema, so saying Maestro has too much in common with it is no insult – most biopics ought to have a lot more in common with Raging Bull than they do – but in the streaming era, for a streaming original that may someday share a platform with the film it seems inspired by, it’s hard to recommend a film with this much overlap.

Maestro is available on Netflix. Raging Bull is currently available on several streaming services.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.