Bradley Cooper returns to music-based relationship drama in this biopic of American composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein. Let’s call it A Tar is Born.

As both actor and director, Cooper delivers a masterclass in how not to conduct oneself. His performance is studied to the point of suffocation, an impressive recital that lacks feeling for the character. After all the column inches dedicated to a prosthetic nose, Maestro shows you can look identical to the subject and still fail to convince us you’re anyone other than Bradley Cooper sniffing around for an Oscar.

He gets equally lost behind the camera, his self-consciously artsy shot compositions doing a disservice to Matthew Libatique’s rich cinematography. Cooper’s decision to shoot scenes from awkwardly far away, or behind some curtains, obscures conversations and even entire characters, creating confusion over who people are. The writing also falls flat, with exposition dumps delivered in clumsy interview scenes and characters inconsistent from one beat to the next.

The result is a pretentious vanity project that tells you little about Bernstein beyond his theatricality and bisexuality. It stubbornly avoids musical or biographical insight, focusing instead on his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). And her participation in civil rights and anti-war protests are never mentioned, reducing a formidable political activist to the usual nagging wife role.

But Maestro ends up being more about Cooper than either of its central characters. In fact the composer comes across as so irritating that you leave wondering what it is about the showboat Leonard Bernstein that Cooper so admires.