What makes this film so compelling is not an easy thing to determine. In terms of its acting and directing and cinematography, this film is spectacular, which you would expect from a director of Christopher Nolan’s caliber. In many ways, this film does the sort of thing that Nolan usually does, only replacing a fictional and fantasy world with a subjective interpretation of the real world, albeit one that is as seemingly unreliable as anything in Momento or Inception. The structure of this film is a frame story that has at least four layers of framing. The biopic itself is the center layer, reframed as a political thriller that shows a generally linear sense of time moving from Oppenheimer’s youth as a student at Cambridge to the glory of his successful effort to create the atomic bomb. This is then framed within a regulatory effort on the part of one Lewis Strauss to deny Oppenheimer the continuance of his top security clearance and dragging his name and reputation through the mud for personal pique. This is further framed within the later effort on the part of Strauss to be confirmed as Secretary of Commerce for Eisenhower several years later. Framing the comparatively familiar story of Oppenheimer’s success at Los Alamos inside the less familiar tales of the anti-Communist witch hunt he faced and the consequences it had for his accuser, both of whom face the same unpleasant reality that confirmation and regulatory hearings are not courts of law and thus lack the sort of evidentiary standards and procedural protections against those whose reputations are under assault.

How much you appreciate this film will depend at least somewhat on how much you are able to read between the line of what is portrayed in the film. Nolan has been criticized by at least some reviewers for not spelling out some of the larger implications of Oppenheimer’s work and the Manhattan Project as a whole, as if such a thing was feasible in what was already a lengthy film at three hours. Nolan clearly had an angle he wanted to present, and does it well, and for those who are intelligent film viewers who do not need every point spoon fed to them, there is a lot here to grasp. Oppenheimer shows a great deal of appreciation in the film for the help he received from foreign, European-born scientists, if not all of them are recognized by name. He recommends that the land of Los Alamos be given back to local tribes, thus alluding to the process of eminent domain that was involved in the creation of the laboratory there. The film explicitly comments on radiation sickness as well as the concerns about reproductive health for those who were exposed to the atomic blast, even if it does not comment on the suffering of those downwind from Los Alamos, at least not directly, though again one can read between the lines of this being a concern. Oppenheimer is portrayed as a complicated man but a great mind, and both more and less sensitive to things than other people are, and neither his womanizing nor his political naivete nor even his arrogance are given a free pass.

While the broad elements of this film are easy enough to understand, the real strength of the film is in its little moments. One of these moments, I will not spoil it, comes at the end, when a critical conversation is revealed that helps to set in contrast the workings of great minds with the petty resentments and defensiveness of small minds. Other small moments of massive importance is what appears to be a suicide that may actually have been a politically motivated murder, Truman considering Oppenheimer to be a crybaby for his qualms about the deaths of the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which Truman seems to gleefully take responsibility for, Oppenheimer asking his brother and sister-in-law help to raise children, which he and his wife seem unable to properly do, as well as Kitty Oppenheimer’s remarkable toughmindedness in the face of her husband’s womanizing as well as against those who she felt betrayed him at the regulatory hearing. In the contrasting portrayals of Oppenheimer and Struass, we see a struggle between the well-educated intellectual and the insecure self-taught and self-made man of business and politics, as well as different portrayals of what it means to be an American Jew. Those who are interested in the complex politics of the 1930s through 1950s will find much to appreciate here, as well as those who are interested in the finer points of American political corruption and the way that powerful people have always abused the operating of the official bureaucracy. This film should by no means be considered the last word about Oppenheimer or Los Alamos or the development or the use of nuclear weapons or energy, but if it encourages people to research more about the subject, it will have done more than enough to justify its runtime and its creation as well as its considerable popularity.