After the success of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper is returning to the director’s chair with another musical film, Maestro, based on the life of celebrated conductor Leonard Bernstein. Cooper, of course, stars as Bernstein in the biographical romance following the life of the acclaimed composer with a focus on his complicated 25-year marriage to Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein, played by Carey Mulligan.
A new trailer for the Netflix awards-bait film shows Cooper’s Leonard in old age reflecting on advice Felicia gave to him. We then see black-and-white flashback scenes of the young pair falling in love. The trailer hints at Bernstein’s bisexuality; Mulligan’s Felicia says to him, “What age are we living in? One can be as free as one likes without guilt or confession. Please, I know exactly who you are,” before a clip of her noticing him making eyes at another man.
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre
The two-minute trailer reveals that being part of Leonard’s world wasn’t without compromise. “There’s a price for being in my brother’s orbit, you know that,” Sarah Silverman’s Shirley Bernstein tells Felicia. The rest of the clip switches back and forth between scenes of the composer’s larger than life career with Felicia supporting him along the way, and flashback moments of the couple in their younger years. It ends with Felicia repeating the same advice Leonard recalls at the beginning of the trailer: “If summer doesn’t sing in you, then nothing sings in you. And if nothing sings in you, then you can’t make music.”
Maya Hawke plays the couple’s daughter, Jamie, and Sam Nivola plays their son. The cast is rounded out by Matt Bomer, Gideon Glick, Gabe Fazio, Eric Parkinson, William Hill, Nick Blaemire, Oscar Pavlo, Tim Rogan and Mallory Portnoy.
Aside from his numerous name checks in last year’s big conduct movie, Tár, Bernstein is perhaps best known for his score to Broadway’s West Side Story and the Marlon Brandon classic film On The Waterfront. Bernstein married Montealegre in 1951, and the New York and Connecticut-based pair had three children together. Over the course of three decades, they had a tumultuous marriage, even separating for a year, though they ultimately were together until Felicia’s death in 1978.
Cooper wrote the Maestro script with Oscar-winning Spotlight writer Josh Singer. The film will premiere at the Venice Film Festival before releasing in theaters on November 22nd, and will then stream on Netflix starting December 20th. Watch the new trailer for Maestro, below:
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