Maestro — Bradley Cooper's cinematic symphony — soars

There's an old dictum in screenwriting: start late and end early. The idea is to boil every scene down to its essentials. That spirit carries throughout the remarkable new film Maestro which Bradley Cooper directed, co-wrote and starred as the iconic composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

While the story stretches from 1943 to 1989, Cooper sketches Bernstein's life with a series of vignettes, glimpses of success and frustration scattered over decades. Like music notes on a page, each builds to the next. The result is a cinematic symphony that is itself an ode to a complicated kind of love. 

The film opens in a black box of a sort, the bright lights of New York City smothered behind a heavy curtain as young Bernstein lounges in bed with his lover. The phone rings, and it's destiny calling, a chance to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, broadcast live across the country. 

Ecstatic, Bernstein rips back the curtain, yelling "You got 'em boy!" Then, as if to capture the sense of excitement, Cooper bends space and time as the conductor bursts out of his apartment, dashing down the hallway to arrive in Carnegie Hall in one fluid camera movement.

It doesn't make sense, but it doesn't have to. For a film about a man who only truly felt free behind the podium, Maestro is a film about feelings, capturing the giddy thrill of an orchestra in full flight, the symphony soaring as the conductor raises his arms to the heavens. 

It is also the story Cooper has been dreaming of telling for years. Before A Star is Born and The Hangover, he was a kid growing up outside Philadelphia.

As Cooper told CBS News, watching cartoons such as Bugs Bunny conducting was what first inspired his interest. When he was eight, he asked Santa for a baton.

Cooper later told Maestro executive producer Steven Spielberg that as a child, he would play Bernstein records and imagine himself leading the orchestra. 

But enthusiasm is not enough to step into the persona of Leonard Bernstein, one of the most recognizable figures of modern classical music. 

For the physical aspects, make-up artist Kazu Hiro, who transformed Gary Oldman into Winston Churchhill, was recruited to blend Cooper into Bernstein.

Hiro created a series of distinct looks to capture the different decades, including a prosthetic nose. While news that the non-Jew Cooper used a fake nose to play the Jewish composer created an initial backlash, the effect is quite subtle.

Not only does Cooper already have a prominent nose, but the make-up is so much more than that, capturing the deep lines, the eventual liver spots, even the wispy silver hairs on elderly Bernstein's arms in scenes that bookend the film. 

For all the make-up and hours of daily preparation, Cooper does some of his best acting with his eyes.

When we first met young Lenny they're delicate and shining, especially as the composer spots the love of his life, Felicia Montealegre. Just before they meet at a party, Cooper sets the scene; when Felicia gets off a bus, the lush music of Bernstein's On the Town swells as she steps into the light.