Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Maestro,” playing the legendary American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper has a light in his eye — a glow of merriment and mischief, of gleeful cosmopolitan desire.
His Lenny is a prodigy, a prankster, a seducer, a monk of creative devotion and, through it all, a man of epic contradiction.
In public, he tends toward the proper and stentorian; in private, he’s recklessly exuberant enough to give new — or maybe old — meaning to the word gay.
He’s a layered soul, a quality that extends from his professional life, where he’s a reverent conductor of the classics and a jubilant composer of Broadway musicals (as well as a serious composer who longs to be thought of as classic), to his personal life, where he’s an ardent hedonist, unapologetically attracted to men, as well as a devoted husband and family man.
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