Our first glimpse of the “Maestro” almost takes one’s breath away. It’s an older Leonard Bernstein — tanned, weathered, familiar mop of unkempt white hair, omnipresent cigarette smoldering within reach, playing a somewhat atonal modern piece at the piano, his hairy (white, also) arms soulfully caressing the keys, his eyes welling up in tears.

That’s not “Lenny” at the keyboard. It’s director, star and co-writer Bradley Cooper, whose makeup-rendered resemblence is so close it’s uncanny and whose interpretation transcends mimicry and achieves something deeper, right in those opening moments.

It’s the performance of the year, in one of 2023’s finest films.

“Maestro” is a conventional musical bio-pic that eschews many of the conventions of the genre to give us impressionistic sketches of the artist at work, and living the “free” of restraints artistic life.

There are no red letter dates emblazened on the screen to tell us when Bernstein gets the last minute call to fill in for the great Bruno Walter at the rostrum, conducting the New York Philharmonic for the first time at 25. Such dates aren’t listed in a chronological parade of touchstone moments of his life.

We don’t see him march towards prominence as a public figure, sample his celebrated “Young People’s Concerts” bringing classical music to the masses and their kids, or watch him slave over his revolutionary score to “West Side Story” with his famous collaborators.

What Cooper goes for here is a tone poem of a creative man’s life, not a documentation of acts of creation.

“Maestro” focuses on the bisexual Bernstein’s love affair and marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), making us believe in this deep romance of the heart, this “arrangement” constantly challenged by the man’s mercurial enthusiasms and his passionate love for people — especially handsome young gay men — and his efforts to literally never be alone. He even kept the toilet door open when hanging with friends.

But this isn’t a sexual biography of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Rocket Man” persuasion. These are all just elements of the liberated, “unrestrained” creative and personal life without limits that Bernstein embodied.

Whatever his flaws, ego and transgressions, when “Lenny” gushes “I love PEOPLE so much,” we believe him. It’s in the movie. And it flickers up in the memory of those who recall the way he carried himself — a great communicator who took a lot of the pretentiousness out of classical music — his reputation for kindness and generosity, the love he was probably a little too willing to spread around.

“Maestro” won’t be wholly accessible to those too young and disconnected from his era to remember Bernstein and his world, and Cooper goes to some pains to let that be the case. You have to know who “Jerry” is, the great choreographer Jerome Robbins (Michael Urie) who would make his reputation with the 1940s ballet about three sailors on the town, “Fancy Free,” which Lenny scored. Maybe knowing who the “Bruno” was who called in sick at the New York Philharmonic helps, and recognizing the vamping Broadway singers (Mallory Portnoy, Nick Blaemire) as the Great White Way icons Betty Comden and Adolph Greene, entertaining everybody at a party thrown by Bernstein’s socially-connected — thanks to him — sister (Sarah Silverman) enriches the film’s experience.

Aaron Copland, Richard “Dick” Hart of “Rodgers & Hart,” Serge Koussevitsky, another Bruno, a Claudio, all flit in and out of the narrative of Bernstein’s workaholic life, his way of coping with loneliness and depression.

Yes, he was tagged as possibly “the first great American (born) conductor,” and close advisors suggested that “they’d never give (the Philharmonic over) to someone named ‘Bernstein,'” and that maybe Lenny — he’d changed his first name from Louis to the more grand and theatrical “Leonard” at 18 — should bill himself as “Leonard Burns.”

He didn’t change his name, and he made that name legendary, world famous and beloved by generations.

Matt Bomer plays David Oppenheim, a great love who forgave Lenny throwing him over for Felicia by marrying a woman himself and staying friends with Bernstein, giving the gregarious Leonard the opening of an adorable “people I LOVE” and “I slept with both of you” crack when he bumps into them on the eastern edge of Central Park. Bomer gives this small role heart with just a barely-concealed “I’m crushed” look.

Cooper illustrates Bernstein’s playfullness and infectious affection for life and other people in the film’s flashiest scenes such as waking up, with a lover, to that made-his-career phone call, exulting at the news, dashing out of his simple flat and into Carnegie Hall in his underwear. Because he was among the legends who rented an upstairs apartment there in his early days.

Lenny courts Felicia by taking her into the theater, onto the stage as “Fancy Free” is deliriously danced in around them and even bringing them into the ballet, a “rehearsal” that plays like a romantic fantasy.

Cooper dazzles in a performance that gets the superficial things perfect and lets us catch the deeply lived interior life in off-the-cuff moments, and in his marvelously self-analytical remarks in a live TV interview with Edward R. Murrow on “Person to Person,” that “personality difference which occurs between any ‘performer’ versus any ‘creator,'” his grasp of the disconnect between the “glamorous” “public” “extrovert life” of a performer “whereas a creative person sits alone in this grey studio, which you see here, and just writes, all by himself, and communicates with the world in a very private way.”

Mulligan’s acting baggage serves her wonderfully here, playing another intelligent, accomplished woman who knows “exactly who” her would-be-husband and then husband is. She and the screenplay give Felicia a patience and indulgence that turns brittle but never bitter as the older Bernstein gets cockier and less “discrete.”

Mulligan lets us see what she saw in him, bowled over his enthusiasms, which instantly include an enthusiasm for her. And Cooper lets us grasp Bernstein’s recognition of a smart outsider and “kindred spirit,” and everything beyond that — legitimacy in high society, family and children — she represented.

The film very much limits itself to these two, their love story, personal and professional partnership. As it sweeps through the decades, 1940s through the late 1980s, it underscores that “different age,” when homosexuality was kept in the closet and when celebrity had, as a general rule, much higher standards than it does today.

People of great achievement walked among us, inspired us and when featured on the much-more-limited TV viewing palette, became grand aspirational figures, legitimate role models, someone whose life was worth envying, mimicking and sampling, if only at arm’s length and only on their world’s periphery.

Cooper brings all that back in a movie that dares to leave out the Big Biographical Bullet Points and just let us see a stunning performance that revives what it was like to see the animated Bernstein conduct, the passionate Bernstein weep at the music of Mahler, at hearing a great orchestra or chorus bring his musical vision to life.

And even as he covers the familiar ground of a career’s rise and a marriage’s tests, Cooper brilliantly gets across his central thesis, that a creative life is by definition, an indulgent one and one that can only be lived without restraint, self-destructive or unacceptable by current-social-mores as it may be.

Rating: R, profanity, drug use, constant smoking.

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer and Sarah Silverman.

Credits: Directed by Bradley Cooper, scripted by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer. An Amblin production, a Netflix release.

Running time:2:09