Once the absurd discourse about Bradley Cooper’s nose will have finally quieted down, those who have been lucky enough to have watched ‘Maestro’ on the big screen will realize they’ve witnessed a masterpiece.

Unbelievably, most articles I’ve read about Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which premiered earlier this September at the Venice Film Festival, have concentrated on his prosthetic nose — a device used to make the handsome actor and director look more like Jewish American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Personally, I couldn’t tell where the star’s real nose ended and the make-up began when I watched Maestro on the Lido, at its gala world premiere. Yes, that is one of the perks of being a Golden Globes voter, one gets to watch films with a real audience, albeit one made up of festival insiders, producers and even Nina Bernstein Simmons, the composer’s daughter.

The story of how Maestro came to be goes back to a time in the early 80’s when Cooper was around 8 years old, and was gifted a baton — the kind of delicate instrument that conductors “play” to direct an orchestra. To that mix was added the below violin concerto by Tchaikovsky, which incidentally saw Leonard Bernstein at the helm, unbeknownst to Cooper, who played along and conducted an imaginary orchestra for hours on end.

In his director’s statement, Cooper calls this “the pilot light I needed to make Maestro,” which he admits was “turned on many years before I actually came across the project,” by those hours spent in the company of his imaginary orchestra and Bernstein’s conducting. But as all great works of art, music as well as the Seventh Art, this idea needed a village. And it got a village, in the form of the creatives who worked on Maestro, including Cooper (who plays Bernstein, as well as directs the film) with screenwriter Josh Singer (Spotlight and The Post are among his oeuvre) and the impressive list of producers on the project, which include Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Incidentally, Spielberg at first tapped Cooper for the role of Bernstein, and was going to direct himself, but when he got too busy with other projects, was happy to see the star as the film’s helmer too.

It is not hard to understand why they would all be attracted like moths to flame to a film about Leonard Bernstein. One only has to watch a rerun on TV of West Side Story, the 1961 original film, to realize what a genius “Lenny” — as Cooper refers to Bernstein — really was, is, and forever will be. That instantly recognizable music, the way it invades our senses, permeating throughout our consciousness, taking hold of our bodies so that we cannot resist trying to dance along, or worse singing along, is the work of a master. A Maestro, as the film is so aptly titled.

Yet making a film that gushes about Bernstein from start to finish would have been as interesting to watch as Cooper’s nose is as a topic of media discussion. And this is where the film’s auteur’s own genius comes in. Cooper turned the story of a man into the tale of a love affair that defied all conventions and to this day, has redefined what a marriage could be. We are talking about the fluidly sexual Bernstein’s marriage to acclaimed actress, artist, and activist Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (played by the wondrous Carey Mulligan), which Cooper calls “an unorthodox, genuine love that I found endlessly intriguing.”

If you wanted a proper, detached review of the film, you would have probably checked out my esteemed colleagues talking about Maestro in Screen, The New York Times or the likes. But I’m assuming you come to this site for the personal tales and so here it is. This one is about my own love “affair” with a man whose sexual preferences were anything but straight. While it was never a marriage and certainly mine wasn’t consummated as Lenny’s and Felicia’s was — see I’m now on first name basis with the protagonists of this stunningly personal film — I still loved him more than I’ve ever loved, nor will ever love someone again. To those who know me, you know his name and you also know he left this world way too soon, leaving in its wake a gap bigger than the black hole.

But what if that love affair had continued? That’s the kind of question that Maestro had me ponder, and I found the answer wonderfully reassuring. In today’s world, we think love is only one type, and yet I grew up with the diverse definitions of love that Paulo Coelho gives, read them here. Or Kahlil Gibran’s poetry On Love, which allows “For love is sufficient unto love.”

Cooper strikes me as an endlessly romantic type too. A Star is Born, his 2018 “remake” of the classics starring Lady Gaga, was devastatingly poetic, and Maestro is too. The way he portrays the couple, their love and their struggles, is perfectly human and makes Maestro a work to watch, as much for its entertainment value as for the values one can take away from its story. The more the film stays with me, the more I realize it will never leave my side and will probably provide a roadmap for future relationships — setting the bar quite high of course. But who doesn’t love a challenge!

The only conundrum I’m left with is which Academy Award or Golden Globe should Cooper win, the Best Actor or Best Director prize? Because let’s face it, both would just be too much. Although in love, and cinema, too much is never enough.

Oh, and if you were wondering just who made that nose which started it all, Academy Award-winning prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro whose own fascination with Bernstein goes back to his childhood years in Japan, “when the composer was visiting Hokkaido and Kazu learned about the man from a documentary program that aired on Japanese television around the time.” He won Oscars for his work on Darkest Hour and Bombshell.

Maestro will be in US cinemas on November 22nd, just in time for Thanksgiving, and on Netflix worldwide on December 20th — just in time for the holidays.

Image courtesy of Netflix, used with permission.