Bradley Cooper is a certified romantic. There was intriguing indication of that sensibility in his directorial debut, 2018’s glorious remake of A Star Is Born, an old-fashioned swooner staged with elegant, modern technique. Further confirmation arrives with Cooper’s second directorial effort, Maestro, a loose biopic of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre. The film, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, is a swirling love poem, both rousing and bitterly sad. It’s also confused, as passion can often make us.

Cooper, who plays Bernstein under some controversial prosthetics, has opted for even more high style than he did in A Star Is Born. The first half or so of the film is in black and white, in a square aspect ratio, as Cooper quickly traces Bernstein’s rise to fame and then more deliberately captures scenes of Bernstein and Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) falling for one another amid a ghost-lit theater and the rolling hills of the Berkshires. They first meet at a smoky, song-filled house party and are instantly enamored of each other’s smarts and openness, their mutual willingness to feel and want in front of one another. These artists from comfortable backgrounds are not living any sort of pinched, mid-century stiffness, denied their ambitions. They are active creatives drawn to a shared flame. And thus, together, they burn—in a good way, for a while.

Cooper, who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, zooms through the years, scenes tumbling into other scenes—children are born, professional trajectories reach ever more heights. Maestro only pauses its ceaseless motion for small moments meant to define a relationship’s dynamic, not to plot significant points on a known timeline. It is refreshing that Maestro is not a staid biopic structured in plodding fashion, delineating Bernstein’s life in its most pertinent beats. West Side Story is only mentioned twice, by my count; Candide no more than that. We occasionally see the great man at work at the podium, huge moments of sweaty physicality that Cooper attacks with gusto. But otherwise this is not a career movie, nor really a creation one. Which may be disappointing for those wanting to see important events in a vital American artist’s history dutifully reenacted; lovers of romantic melodrama, though, ought to be more satisfied.

The Bernstein of it all—his uniquely notable presence in, and effect on, the world—is conjured up mostly through music, that which he wrote or famously conducted. What wonders these selections are: the towering thrill of his Ely Cathedral performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony; the nimble pluck of Fancy Free, with its early evocations of West Side dance-battles; the sweep and lilt of A Quiet Place. Cooper relies heavily on these selections to convey meaning. And why shouldn’t he, when they are such testament to a prodigy’s output, his novel inventions and his singular ear for interpreting classics of old? The extended sequence in which Bernstein furiously conducts the Mahler symphony is especially striking, an artist in his older years finding his fire anew—nicely linked, in the movie’s narrative, with a rekindling of his marriage.

The union of Bernstein and Montealegre was peculiar or progressive, depending on whom you asked. Bernstein had many affairs with men, a fact from which the film—while still devoted to its mission of depicting a deep and abiding heterosexual marriage—does not shy away. Declarative statements are never made; labels are not assigned. But the matter of Bernstein’s sexuality, and his increasing indiscretion about it, is bandied about quite often as the film reaches its climax, by then unfolding in Matthew Libatique’s rich color photography. Cooper uses Bernstein’s consistent dalliances with men—and, in some cases, genuine romantic affairs—as the wedge threatening to drive Bernstein and Montealegre apart for good. We may never know for certain whether or not that was exactly the case in real life. But it is squarely presented as such in Maestro, an argument that plays as perhaps too easy and direct an analysis given all the abstraction and nuance afforded the couple in the rest of the film.

Though Maestro confronts queerness head on, it is curiously silent on Bernstein and (perhaps especially) Montealegre’s political activism. The famous Black Panther Party event Montealegre held at the family’s apartment in 1970, which led to the writer Tom Wolfe sneeringly coining the term “radical chic,” is not mentioned at all in the film. Nor are any of the couple’s other noble causes. One gets the queasy impression that Cooper wants to keep his film free of those particular complications, lest they too rigidly define and contextualize these two lovers so fiercely vying for our affection.

Maestro’s omissions and selective inclusions, its veering between epic romance and impressionist portrait of an artist, make the film hard to grab onto. Bernstein’s mercurial character—his blue fugues and insistent ego, his generosity of soul and spirit, the luminous output of his mind—are stated more than felt, despite so much beautiful music and imagery churning around him. We get a sketch of a marriage and a fainter sketch of an artist’s path, neither as fully developed as one would hope for from such an ardently invested and exuberant film. Cooper, a lifelong Bernstein fan who has done a heap of research and then plucked out what he deemed the salient parts of the story, can’t stay focused enough on one task. He is torn between sonorous hagiography and chiaroscuro marital watercolor, an ambivalence that dampens the film’s potential impact.

There to clarify and elevate the film, then, are the two central performances, big and breakneck. Both Cooper and Mulligan go hard on vocal affect, proudly slather on makeup, practically chain smoke their way through the entire film. There is subtlety to be found in each characterization—the way Cooper deftly illustrates clouds passing over Bernstein’s psyche, Mulligan’s careful calibration of sophisticated mettle and jilted vulnerability—but the largeness of the performances, their voluble grandness as they embody icons going about vivid lives, is to be admired too. No doubt there will be some who find it all too much, too mannered and studied and theatrical. But hopefully more audiences will thrill to this high-wire act from actors so dedicated and in thrall to Maestro’s feverish project.

While plenty of scenes in Maestro have their discrete power—teeming with insight and impressive artistry—it’s only in an appreciation of Mulligan and Cooper’s full-bodied work that the greater whole finds resonance. In them lies the film’s true majesty, its best and most convincing approximation of what it is to love and create and, in so doing, reveal something transcendent.