Christopher Nolan is my favorite director.  He is one of the few filmmakers whose name alone is enough to get me to the theater.  In fact, he may be the only one.

For example, although Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash and First Man are among my all-time favorite movies, even Chazelle’s brilliance on those projects wasn’t enough to get me to see La La Land, much less Babylon.

But “A Christopher Nolan Film” is enough of a selling point to prompt a ticket purchase.  That’s a curse as well as a blessing, though, as there is a straight line from the immense respect I have for Nolan to the temptation of unrealistic expectations.

So it was when I saw the first trailer for Oppenheimer.  It was then that I began a several-month conversation with myself in an attempt to keep those expectations in check.  Although I was largely successful, I still think Nolan’s very, very good movie probably came up just short of the movie that the trailer conjured in my overactive imagination.

But I don’t want this to sound like a negative review.  It isn’t.  It is an overwhelmingly positive review.  Oppenheimer will be one of the best films of the year, if not the best.  It will earn Oscar nominations in at least a half-dozen categories.  Possibly twice that many—and deservedly so.

For starters, the cast is superb.  Just superb.  Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt all shine, among others.  But there are also numerous smaller roles played by actors like Gary Oldman, Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck, and Rami Malek, not to mention terrific cameos from recognizable faces like James Remar.

In particular, I think Murphy must be the favorite to win Best Actor, and Downey will get a well-deserved nomination for Best Supporting Actor (and may win).  The film, of course, will be nominated for Best Picture, although I think Killers of the Flower Moon may wind up with the edge there.

Having said all of the above, when judged against the best of what makes Nolan films so memorable and powerful, I can’t yet decide whether Oppenheimer is in the uppermost tier.

Let me explain.  The acting, sets, direction, practical effects, cinematography, sound editing, dialogue, and costume design are all superlative.  Put more succinctly, Oppenheimer is undoubtedly excellent in a conventional sense.

But therein lies the paradox: one of the essential qualities that makes Christopher Nolan films so interesting is how unconventional they can be.  Relatedly, one consistent feature of his films is that I need to see them at least twice to be able to appreciate them fully.  The second I finished The Prestige, I wanted to watch it again.  I definitely didn’t like Interstellar nearly as much after the first viewing as I did the second.  And I don’t think I even fully understood Tenet until I saw it the second time.

That’s why I have to say that I don’t think Oppenheimer plays to all of Nolan’s strengths.  It is a terrific biopic, beautifully and authentically shot.  It does not feel like a three-hour film, although it is.  It delivers plenty of substance and subtext and doesn’t beat its audience over the head with unsubtle messages like our other current summer blockbuster, allowing viewers to make their own decisions about the relative morality of those involved.  In fact, the only character portrayed in a definitively (and curiously) unflattering light is President Harry Truman.  Gary Oldman’s Truman comes off as anything but presidential in his short appearance.

Even Lewis Strauss, the unquestioned antagonist of the film, delivers a pretty-darn-accurate monologue near the end of the film that lays out Oppenheimer’s character flaws, noting that Oppenheimer wants the credit for Trinity, but not any of the blame from those who would condemn Hiroshima and Nagasaki as crimes against humanity.

Nolan is to be commended for these portrayals, balancing a clear narrative with the complexity of who these men and women were in real life—in some cases, brilliant or heroic in one context, but weak or deeply defective in others.

But Nolan is at his strongest when he doesn’t have tight guardrails, and a largely historically accurate biopic forces Nolan to comport with those restrictions in ways that creative, unconventional endeavors like Tenet or Inception do not.  Even something like The Prestige, which is based on a fiction book, allowed Nolan far more leeway than telling the nonfiction story of the book American Prometheus in Oppenheimer.

Beyond that, Dunkirk, which is grounded in history, has enough anonymous, composite, or fictional characters for Nolan to tell the story in a way that he can make his own while remaining true to the historical essence.  A reasonably accurate biopic about one man necessarily constrains that freedom to a great extent in ways that other subjects do not.

In short, what I remember most about the best Nolan films is the creativity.  As I said in my review of Inception:

As I watched it again, I was struck by how much concepts related to time and perception are central themes in nearly every Christopher Nolan film.  The straightforward Dark Knight trilogy aside, most of Nolan’s works play with these concepts in interesting ways, regardless of the substance of the plot.

The obvious example is Memento, which requires significant focus by the viewer just to be able to follow what’s actually happening in the movie.  But a similar trend has continued up to the present day, with Dunkirk featuring three parallel tracks of time that ultimately converge, while Tenet includes a mind-bending lattice of time and anti-time events that make repeat viewings almost mandatory.

Inception requires a comparably heavy “lift” for the audience, as it plays with dream-within-a-dream(-within-a-dream!(-within-a-dream?)) concepts that leave the viewer guessing about what, exactly, is real, right up until the final frame.  As an aside, for the record, I believe DiCaprio has woken up at the end—but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter, which I think is the point.

Movies like Interstellar, The Prestige, Tenet, Memento, and even Dunkirk vex audiences in the most engaging way by tinkering with our perception (especially of time) to various degrees.  Oppenheimer jumps around a bit, but in a more conventional, limited way that is only somewhat more non-linear than other contemporary biopics.  And that’s not Nolan’s fault.

He must tell this man’s story, and, unlike most of his other films, Nolan’s customary creativity would interfere with, not enhance, his ability to compile a compelling narrative.

Thus, what we get is maybe the best possible version of a three-hour biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer.  But it is, perhaps, not the best possible version of a “Christopher Nolan” film.

Aside from the creative limitations, the movie shifts around three different story threads, none of which seem to be told in a complete way.  First, there’s the story of the bomb itself, which is inherently fascinating, but also well-traveled terrain.  We really only get snippets of that story, and a few key moments related to Los Alamos—like the deadly “demon core” incident just after the bombing—are omitted.

I compare it here to a movie like Apollo 13, another of my favorites.  In that film, we understand in a step-by-step way the technical challenges and subsequent problem-solving NASA scientists and astronauts tackled.  In Oppenheimer, there’s more about the interpersonal rivalries or ideological clashes among scientists, and less about the immense technical challenges and the bona fide miracle that was the Manhattan Project.

To give one example, when Oppenheimer and company receive intel that the Germans are concerned about heavy water and haven’t moved on to graphite, they’re elated.  There’s a passing reference to the realization that the Germans are going down the wrong path, but it’s difficult for the audience to understand the significance of the news or why it matters, beyond a general sense that the Americans have moved ahead of Nazi bomb development.

This shortcoming is defensible to an extent—how many of us in the audience would be able to grasp the science of the Manhattan Project?  However, I’m not an astronomer, mathematician, or an astronaut, either, and I felt as though I understood the basics of the Apollo 13 challenges every step of the way during that film.

Here, though, Nolan seems more interested in character studies than the story of the bomb—a story that, as I said, has been told many times.  This is also why he elects not to show any actual war footage in a movie that is largely about World War II.  I think some viewers will criticize that decision, but I disagree.

I think this was the correct and appropriate choice, keeping the focus on these people and their work.  Even when there’s a post-bombing scene in which the scientists see slides depicting the effects of the bombs and their radiation on the Japanese, what we the audience see is Oppenheimer’s reaction—which fairly quickly becomes an inability to face up to the reality of what he has created.

That highlights the fact that Oppenheimer is, of course, fundamentally about this man and his personal connections and less about what’s going on in the world around him, even momentous, world-changing events like World War II that are just one step removed from Oppenheimer’s work.

That focus on people leads to the second thread—the story of Oppenheimer’s relationships with women and the effects of those relationships.  This story is probably the weakest of the three, as Nolan’s presentation of Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt’s characters can shift wildly at times, both in terms of their personality traits and their seeming importance.  One example: Kitty Oppenheimer, played by Blunt, is shown as variously unfaithful, alcoholic, neglectful of her child, volatile, and, eventually, brilliant, supportive, and intensely loyal.

If you haven’t seen the movie, you may be saying, “Wait, didn’t you just praise the complex portrayal of these characters?”  There’s “complex,” and then there’s “inconsistent without explanation.”

Much like the Manhattan Project thread, this component of the overall story seems to have links missing from the chain.  It isn’t bad by any means, but there are some inconsistencies that are probably character evolutions to which we aren’t fully privy.  For example, Kitty shifts from seemingly unstable and weak to far stronger than Oppenheimer himself, with few hints as to how that transformation may have occurred.

Finally, there’s the story of Oppenheimer’s security clearance revocation and the associated denial of Strauss’ cabinet nomination several years later.  This is the best-told and most “Nolan” of the three.

There are missing bits here, too—but intentionally so.  We see all of the important ones.  Then, in the end, all of the remaining dots connect so as to reveal the truth behind everything we’ve been seeing for the past three hours.  And, in the very last moment of the film, we not only receive a revelation about a much-discussed missing plot point, but that revelation leads to a harrowing conclusion about everything that we’ve seen in the entire movie.

Namely, that this movie is actually a prequel to a seemingly inevitable apocalypse that we pray we’ll never live to see.

There’s a lot to love about this film, particularly in that third thread, and there is no question whatsoever that it is beautifully made and wonderfully acted.  It is a very well-crafted and, above all else, thought-provoking film.  With that said, it did not produce the same kind of emotional connection or the same level of active engagement as my favorite films I’ve seen in recent years, some Nolan films included.

It is a stellar film, which is what matters most.

But I’m not sure it’s stellar at being a quote-unquote Christopher Nolan film, if that makes sense.

Perhaps I’ll feel differently after a second viewing.