On demand: "Maestro"

If you'd told me ten years ago that Bradley Cooper - permasmirking star of the Hangovers and the A-Team rehash - would over the next decade direct not one but two of the most notable recent American films about music, you would in return have heard a scoff as loud as any sonic boom. (I refuse to believe that Cooper was touting anything more resonant than a Spotify playlist called "Sexy Grooves", featuring all the Chili Peppers he used to annoy his dormmates with.) Perhaps there is still room for growth and maturity in 21st century Hollywood, however, because Cooper has delivered just that, first with 2018's A Star is Born, and now Maestro, his biopic of the composer Leonard Bernstein. Star, with its breakout role for Lady Gaga and attendant hit single, was wholly pop. Maestro proves classical in both content and construction. It films the Fifties and Sixties in shimmering, oldie-movie black-and-white - not the last time it can be observed pandering to boomers - and the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties in colour; its screenplay, which Cooper co-wrote with Josh Singer, opens with a prologue in which an elderly Bernstein (Cooper under latex) confesses he's missing something from his life, then provides a two-hour flashback that explains who this missing piece was and how he lost her. It's an innately romantic take on this life. Along the way, we will hear snatches of the Bernstein canon - On the Town, West Side Story et al. - but the story Cooper and Singer want to tell is one about a girl. As Felicia Montealegre, Carey Mulligan steps into an adoringly framed Cinemascope close-up, and the movie begins to describe how man-in-motion Bernstein drew her in, turned her on, and finally, regrettably, shook her loose.

This brings us to one of Maestro's strengths: the film is handsome, absorbing, and nothing if not smooth (where last year's composer-driven awards contender Tár - in which the real Bernstein cameoed - was either thrillingly or alienatingly spiky), and yet it never once lapses into middlebrow inertia. Cooper knows he has a lot of ground to cover, and Maestro presents as a properly moving picture from the moment the fresh-faced Lenny is roused from slumber by a career-changing phone call informing him he is to deputise for an ailing colleague at Carnegie Hall. As he sprints across town to the fabled venue, half-panicked and half-elated, we're led to believe that, yes, this probably is what a half-century of stratospheric upward mobility must have felt like. To the pantheon, and beyond! Felicia, for her part, is conceived as just about the only person who could get the boyish Bernstein to sit still: lazing back-to-back with her man in the shade of a Central Park tree, or sharing a post-coital cigarette after temporarily exhausting him in the sack. Yet the history books will show Felicia Montealegre needed more than a few idle minutes in passing here and there to figure out what made her guy tick; and that, despite a late-life reunion, too many of their best years really were lost, scattered like pages of score in the wind. All this movement, the film posits, was in part a ruse to distract the casual onlooker from a sad, quiet, stubborn little secret: that, even without a baton in his hand, Lenny B swung both ways, and more energetically than most, not that he could acknowledge this publicly.

It should be noted at this juncture that Maestro represents an altogether straight filming of a prominent queer life. The tragedy framed here is that its subject wasted time he could have spent playing hetero happy families chasing young men around after dark; and the script shows next to no dramatic interest in Bernstein's male lovers, instead hustling us past them as if they were all bum notes. The treatment does, however, stir up that thunderous melodrama that was integral to the composer's music, the whirlwind of sound and emotion you hear whenever anybody slaps on West Side Story. This is a chaste film, but it's not a genteel one, forever seeking as it does to translate punchy clusters of notes into bruising scenes and conflicts (and vice versa). There's a reason everyone recalls the namecheck in REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" as being sung in upper case; it's quite possible that was the name - all caps, with optional exclamation mark(s) - Cooper and Singer set down at the top of their yellow legal pads before composing their first draft. Aggressively garrulous, forcefully convivial, forever pursuing some charm offensive, this Bernstein is a most seductive monster. If he comes over as mannered in Cooper's interpretation, he's no less mannered than Bernstein himself; and real thought has been paid as to how to age the character subtly and convincingly, not always the case with modern biopics. Best of all, the new Cooper is generous and gracious: the more his Lenny skulks or storms off frame left, the more space there is for Mulligan's Felicia. This is the film that confirms this actress has a superb mouth for close-ups, her fragile smiles only accentuated by the recesses either side of her lips; when she frowns, those dimples pull us down further into the character's sadnesses. We get a surfeit of both in Cooper's film, so closely were joy and despair linked in this relationship; as a union, it was in a very real sense complicated. Maestro shows us Bernstein the great man, and its musical setpieces underline how great he could be. Yet it also senses how greatness - the urge to throw one's arms wide open and embrace the world entire - could in itself be hurtful and problematic. This Bernstein is a man who leaves the bathroom door open for fear of being alone with himself and his thoughts. Some men cannot be contained; some are always looking for an exit strategy.

Maestro is now streaming on Netflix.