'Oppenheimer' review: Stellar cast makes this three-hour epic compelling

A curious idea arises early in “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the man who helped invent the atomic bomb. Visiting his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, New Mexico, for the first time, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr excitedly asks whether the weapon is big enough – not just to end the Second World War, he clarifies, but “to end all war.”

Were people ever so naïve? They were, Oppenheimer among them. If Nolan’s dense, three-hour epic teaches us anything about its subject, it’s that even the most visionary minds have their blind spots. Based on “American Prometheus,” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's 721-page, Pulitzer-winning biography published in 2005, “Oppenheimer” tells the story of a theoretical physicist who ushered in the nuclear age but couldn’t see the political signposts that would lead to his eventual downfall.

Played by Cillian Murphy (of Nolan’s “Dark Knight” films), Oppenheimer is hard to pin down, like those photons that shift when you observe them. He’s arrogant yet fragile, awkward yet charismatic, able to comprehend quantum mechanics yet unable to see why socializing with communists might cause him any professional problems. He regularly sleeps with one, Jean Tatlock, played by a smoldering Florence Pugh, and marries a former party member (Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer). He also suggests nuclear information-sharing between the Soviet Union and the U.S. to foster peace – an idea that not everyone finds adorable. The UC Berkeley scientist Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) begs Oppenheimer to be more careful: “You’re not just self-important,” he says, “you’re actually important.”

Nolan builds the movie around the Trinity test-blast (he even recreated the bunker and drop-tower in the New Mexico desert) and it’s a visceral vision of hellfire, achieved without CGI and captured by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. Still, the story’s real richness lies in Oppenheimer’s messy personal life, and to that end his acquaintances are played by many of the best actors around (so many, in fact, that Rami Malek, Casey Affleck and other Oscar winners appear in split-second roles). The clear standout is Robert Downey, Jr., as the calculating politician Lewis Strauss, while a close second is Matt Damon as the no-nonsense brigadier general Leslie Groves (director of the Manhattan Project).

There’s some truth in the notion that, like the fire-bearing Prometheus, Oppenheimer gave mankind an awesome new power but received punishment instead of thanks. On a less mythical note, things might have gone better for this celebrated genius if he’d just learned to read a room and kiss the right rings. However you choose to view “Oppenheimer,” it’s the picture of a man who reaped everything he sowed.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman