It was produced by Cooper, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Fred Berner and Amy Durning [de].

The film stars Carey Mulligan as Montealegre alongside Cooper as Bernstein; Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, and Sarah Silverman appear in supporting roles.

The rest of the cast joined between 2020 and 2023, and filming took place between May and October 2022, in Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Bernstein's home in Connecticut, and England.

Despite being in an intermittent relationship with clarinetist David Oppenheim, he falls for aspiring actress Felicia Montealegre at a party and the two begin dating.

By the mid-1950s, the Bernsteins live a highly affluent life in the public eye, with Leonard having composed several successful operas and Broadway musicals, including Candide and West Side Story.

One Thanksgiving, after Leonard returns home to their apartment in The Dakota late from a bender, he and Felicia have an explosive argument where she insists that he has hate in his heart, and will "die a lonely old queen" if he continues on his current path.

Felicia is diagnosed with breast cancer which has metastasized to the lung; despite surgeries and an aggressive chemotherapy regimen, her condition deteriorates, and she dies in Leonard's arms in 1978.

Once retaining rights, Berner and Durning approached Josh Singer to develop and write a screenplay and attached Martin Scorsese as a director.

[10] Berner, Durning, and Scorsese continued on as producers alongside Spielberg and Kristie Macosko Krieger of Amblin Entertainment.

[26] The music played by Bernstein at the piano during the prologue comes from his 1983 opera A Quiet Place which depicts a dysfunctional family, including an estranged gay son whose mother has just died.

[30][31] The film began a limited theatrical release in the United States on November 22, 2023, with engagements in Dolby Cinema, before streaming on Netflix on December 20, 2023.

[32][33] Although Netflix does not publicly report box office grosses, IndieWire estimated the film made about $200,000 from eight theaters in its opening weekend (and a total of $300,000 over the five-day Thanksgiving frame), which would make it the most successful debut for the company since at least 2019.

The website's consensus reads: "Led by a pair of powerful performances, Maestro serves as a stirring overview of a tremendous talent's life and legacy.

"[35] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on 62 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[38] Adam Graham of Detroit News wrote, "Maestro comes alive as Cooper filters Bernstein's passion for life and all its grand indulgences into an intensely physical performance, which peaks in a sweat-drenched conducting sequence that bursts off the screen.

"[40] In a review for El País, Carlos Boyero wrote: "Cooper whimsically uses color and black and white to portray his life, and exotic planning to recount Bernstein’s present and past.

[45] The Anti-Defamation League noted historical media portrayal of Jews as "evil caricatures with large, hooked noses" but said that "this film, which is a biopic, ... is not that".

[47] The New Yorker published an essay defending the special effects make-up used by Hiro in the film and numbered him as among the top three or four special effects make-up artists of the past fifty years stating the film's background intentions as: "In the beginning, Hiro worked on a prosthetic treatment that was, in Cooper's words, 'totally Lenny'.