Maestro captures Bradley Cooper’s struggle to define what he really wants to be

polygon.com:

Maestro is a movie about Leonard Bernstein. It’s also a movie about Bradley Cooper’s career. In its bravura peaks and moments of rest, the film becomes an ouroboros of art and artist, a current creator channeling a historical one and wrestling with the same questions he faced, struggling in the same way to not let their passions subsume them, unsure whether they’re successful. It’s mesmerizing.

Midway through Maestro, Bernstein — played by Cooper, who also directed and co-scripted — gives a TV interview where he’s asked about the difference between his roles as a composer and a conductor. Bernstein describes the former as introverted work, a private labor that makes being around others difficult. The latter, he characterizes as an extroverted profession, one that feeds off of other people’s energy.

“If you carry around both personalities,” he says, “I suppose that means you become a schizophrenic, and that’s the end of it.”

This is Maestro’s central conflict, the proverbial two wolves that the film’s version of Bernstein wrestles with. Conductor and composer, husband and philanderer, family man and liberated artist — each are oppositional forces that feed one of the two poles of his artistic being. And the conflict only gets more compelling when you consider the filmmaker.

Maestro serves as a fascinating prism for Bradley Cooper’s career. It’s easy to forget how unlikely and meteoric his ascent was. Oliver Lyttelton’s 2015 retrospective at IndieWire summed up Cooper’s trajectory as “little-known TV actor to comedy villain to A-list leading man in less than a decade.” A couple of years after that, Cooper added a few new Oscar nominations to his resume, thanks to his 2018 remake of A Star Is Born. Thus far, he’s amassed