Enlarge / Cillian Murphy gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the “father of the atomic bomb” in Oppenheimer (credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures)

I’ll admit I had my doubts when I first heard that director Christopher Nolan was planning to make a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the research effort to develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. This is one of the most well-documented periods of 20th century American history, after all, and there have already been so many books, films, and TV series about the race for the bomb, of varying quality. (As always, let me give a shout-out to Manhattan, a stellar fictional series that was tragically canceled after just two seasons.) How would Nolan make this very well-trodden material his own?

I needn’t have fretted. With Oppenheimer, Nolan has gifted us a truly unique, unflinching, nuanced portrait of the enigmatic, complicated man who spearheaded the Manhattan Project and subsequently ran afoul of the “red-baiting” politics of the McCarthy era. Technically it’s a biopic, but it doesn’t play like one. It’s more like Nolan carefully selected various threads running through Oppenheimer’s life and wove them into richly textured tapestry that somehow transcends those raw materials. The result is pure visual poetry.

(Spoilers below, although this is very well-documented history.)