This is the best summary I could come up with:

Bradley Cooper works a similar kind of seduction in his superb and deeply felt Leonard Bernstein opus Maestro, premiering at the Venice Film Festival.

From there, Cooper—who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer—details Bernstein’s rise as an ebullient, expressive conductor and a composer whose music spoke in an urbane but wholly approachable pop-music vernacular.

Cooper is happy to explore Leonard’s charm, but he finds the heartlessness in this character too: at times his eyes look like small, steely pin-dots, focused only on his own goals and desires.

Those include wanting a family, and the scenes of the Bernsteins’ at-home life, much of it set in a grand-yet-welcoming Connecticut house, make it clear how much this self-absorbed, driven man truly loved his kids.

The two fight bitterly—it’s Thanksgiving Day, and with the kids laughing and shouting in the other room as the Macy’s parade balloons float by the apartment windows, Felicia lets loose with a tirade of accusations and resentments, all of them justified.

The elation on his face, a private ecstasy that he bestows, like a gift, on the audience, suddenly makes the world seem ten times larger, and more beautiful, than it did before the music started.

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