Some time in the early ’70s, a friend was on his way to visit Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia at their New York City apartment in the Dakota. When he got out of the elevator, he was surprised to see “Bernstein necking in the hallways with a beautiful 20-year-old boy.” When the friend entered the apartment, Felicia was sitting there patiently, probably with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other. “When asked what she was doing, Felicia said she was waiting.  ‘I’ve been waiting for Lenny all my life.’”

The anecdote comes from Meryle Secrest’s 1994 biography, “Leonard Bernstein — A Life.”  As soon as it was announced that Bradley Cooper was making a biopic about Bernstein, and that it would focus on his relationship with Felicia, I immediately knew that it would be filled with scenes like this. In many ways, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein was the archetypal long-suffering wife, and any portrayal of their marriage would be filled with scenes of her waiting and agonizing, staring at the window and not knowing where her husband was — or, worse, knowing.

These scenes are in there, but they are hardly the whole story.  “Maestro” does a better job of telling the story of the Bernsteins than most of the print biographies — with the possible exception of their daughter Jamie’s memoir, “Growing Up Bernstein.” 

The film concentrates on this aspect of Bernstein’s life — in fact, “Finding the Bernsteins” would have been a better title than “Maestro.” Thankfully, the music is omnipresent; the soundtrack album, which is also highly recommended, is a marvelous sampler of Bernstein’s work, including snippets from his symphonies, musical comedies (though it’s a stretch to label “West Side Story” a comedy), operas, film scores, and brief excerpts from his classic interpretations of Beethoven and Mahler.   

Bernstein’s politics are not part of the film’s story.  I was wondering how they would deal with his infamous cocktail party for the Black Panther Party in 1970, but, for better or worse, it’s not in the script. I was hoping that there’d be more of his love and support for jazz — he was a mean boogie-woogie pianist — but even at 130 minutes there isn’t room for everything. 

The screenplay starts with Mr. Cooper as Bernstein in the ’80s — looking exactly as Bernstein does in the footage from the 1985 opera-style recording of “West Side Story.”  He starts to talk about his late wife, which sets off a series of flashbacks. All of a sudden we’re in 1943 as he makes his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, as a last-minute substitute for an ailing Bruno Walter. 

We then cut to roughly three years later, when Lenny first meets Felicia, at a party with his sister Shirley (a game Sarah Silverman) during which his collaborators Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) and Adolph Green (Nick Blaemire) are entertaining with numbers from “On The Town.” The scenes from earlier in his life are shown in black & white; the cutoff point, when it transitions into color, appears to be when he takes over the New York Phil in 1958.

As both director and star, Mr. Cooper is extraordinary; several key scenes are in a medium long shot; one of the surprisingly few when they show Mr. Cooper as Bernstein actually conducting at any duration is at his famous 1973 concert of Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” at Washington Cathedral. Another shows the Bernsteins having their usual heated argument over his philandering, this time in their apartment in the Dakota during the Thanksgiving parade; through the window we can see Snoopy and other cartoon character balloons floating by.  

In both cases, Mr. Cooper positions his camera far enough away from the action and dwells on long shots and long takes, with a deliberate artlessness that make it seem more like a documentary or newsreel filming than a narrative movie. We know that, at a certain point later in his career, Bernstein had all his concert performances filmed; these scenes make it look like the Maestro had a cameraman following him around in his personal life as well, as an NBC president, David Sarnoff, supposedly did. 

Mr. Cooper does an amazing job; like Jamie Foxx in “Ray” 20 years ago, we forget we are even watching an actor. Yet there’s more “Oscar buzz,” as they say, about Carey Mulligan as Felicia; perhaps she has an advantage in that even though we know Montealegre was a prominent actress on early television dramas, virtually no one living today is familiar with her work. She and Bernstein separate but reconcile right before she is diagnosed with cancer, and Bernstein is accurately portrayed as heroically devoted to her as she suffers through the treatment.

What the movie doesn’t dwell on — but which Secrest and the other biographers make clear — is that after Felicia’s death, Bernstein was like a ship without a sail, and no rudder or helm, either. Although he was now free to indulge in any kind of a lifestyle he wanted, he was completely lost at sea, and entered into a dark pit of drinks, drugs, and depression.  By all accounts he was far from a happy man at the time of his death at 72 in 1990.

Maybe, in the afterlife, Felicia Montealegre is at last outshining her very famous husband, and exacting a kind of revenge that she never would have wanted.