Review: 'Maestro' is Bradley Cooper's heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as Leonard Bernstein

Looking for something absolutely extraordinary at the movies? Then do yourself a favor and see "Maestro," now in theaters.

Note to the Academy: start engraving the name Bradley Cooper on the Oscar for best actor. His heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as legendary composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein will be talked about for years.

As director and co-writer (with Josh Singer) of "Maestro," Cooper basically conducts his own performance. That's tricky business, but Cooper rarely hits a bum note, releasing Bernstein's personal angels and demons, along with his glorious music.

Unlike the flamboyant fictional conductor Cate Blanchett expertly portrayed in "Tar," Cooper is immortalizing the real deal.

Lenny, as everyone called him, came at life with a ravenous hunger, his carnal desire for both sexes matched by music that encompassed everything from symphonies, operas and youth concerts to Broadway. Snobs claimed that "West Side Story," "On the Town" and "Candide" trivialized Lenny's ambitions as a classical artist. What bull. Bernstein became the first Jewish American conductor to win global acclaim and "West Side Story" is constantly in play.

Lenny seduced whomever and whatever he desired with a fervent abandon. His wife, the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, was the great if hardly exclusive love of his life and a never-better Carey Mulligan instills her with a ravishing grit and grace. She's pure perfection.

As a director, Cooper surpasses his acclaimed 2018 debut with "A Star Is Born." It's been his longtime goal to put the Bernstein story on screen and you can feel his commitment in every frame. Like Bernstein, he brings everything he's got to the dream assignment, using all the tools of cinema, from editing to revolutionary sound design, to do Bernstein proud.

Cooper opens his film with an aging Lenny -- his hair a shock of white, his patrician voice hoarse from constant smoking -- sitting at his piano for a TV interview in which he mourns Felicia's death. The makeup deserves an Oscar, but technical mastery is only a way to a greater intimacy.

Camera wiz Matthew Libatique shoots with a poet's eye, switching from color to black and white. Suddenly, it's Nov. 14, 1943, and 25-year-old Lenny jumps out of bed next to a naked dude, whose butt he slaps like a drum riff, to take a call from the New York Philharmonic. Can he step in -- no rehearsal -- for ailing conductor Bruno Walter. Her can. And, boom, a star is born.

Lenny falls hard for Felicia, despite a warning from Lenny's sister Shirley (a sublimely wicked Sarah Silverman) about the collateral damage of living in Lenny's orbit. She's not kidding and the feeling intensifies as the film hurtles through time and the rise of the great man.

Felicia accepts Lenny's addiction to men until, well, she can't. Their blowout in the cavernous New York apartment they share with their three adored children is shot at a distance, yet you feel the emotional bruises as festive balloons from the Thanksgiving parade drift by outside.

Later, in the Bernstein home in Connecticut, a protective Lenny denies talk of his gay flings to his teen daughter Jamie (a tender, terrific Maya Hawke). It's a defense foreshadowed when Lenny runs into clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer, first-rate as always), a former lover walking in the park with his wife and baby.

"I've slept with both your parents," Lenny teases the tot.

He's making light of a serious issue. In the sexually restrictive era of the 1950s, closeted men sometimes married and had children to save their careers. Some still do. Cooper makes it clear, however, that Lenny wasn't faking anything with Felicia. Their mutual love powers the film.

As does the sublime music that underscores every detail in Lenny's life, from imagining himself as a flirty dancing sailor in tight pants for the Jerome Robbins hit ballet "Fancy Free" to actually conducting "Make Our Garden Grow," the soul-stirring chorale finale from "Candide."

Still, the killer moment in a film brimming over with them is Bernstein conducting Mahler's Second Symphony in London at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. Cooper revealed that he spent six years learning how to conduct just these six minutes of music -- live on set with real musicians -- in the style of the maestro. His commitment is total and electrifying.

The scene culminates with Lenny rushing off the stage to thundering applause to throw his arms around Felicia, nearly crushing her with bear hugs and devouring kisses. In Cooper's vision, Lenny would do the same to the music itself if he could. And the audience. And the world.

How do you live with that? In this portrait of a flawed artist whose self absorption could be dangerous to those who got too close, Lenny is definitely a challenge. But one worth taking.

Cooper doesn't beg forgiveness for Lenny -- he could be a real s.o.b. -- just understanding, which is an easier and more revealing ask.

You'll hear complaints that "Maestro" is too much about the man, too little about the art. But who wants biopic tropes when Cooper and Mulligan are offering a triumphant labor of love that reveals just how Bernstein found the music that made him dance.