Maestro, Bradley Cooper's new film about Leonard Bernstein, co-written by Cooper and Josh Singer, is the best biographical drama I've ever seen about a serious musician, and in strictly cinematic and narrative terms maybe the boldest, most inventive, even innovative movie about an artist since Fellini's 8½. Bernstein's life and work have been exhaustively documented in books, films, videos, and recordings. Bestriding the second half of the last century like a colossus, he mastered virtually all the many endeavors to which he set himself: composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, television educator, writer, critic, scholar, humanitarian, philanthropist, socio-political activist.
With all this so readily known, Cooper eschews the typical biographical approach and chooses to concentrate on the marriage between Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn, an elegant Chilean-born actress with a career of…
