“Can you hear the music?” asks physicist Niels Bohr to a young J. Robert Oppenheimer in an early scene from Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer. And indeed, he could. Just as Mozart was known to compose symphonies as if receiving diction direct from God, Oppenheimer would suffuse his chalkboards with dense equations and hypotheses; his mind would animate the static symbols, giving life to theoretical musings. He not only understood radical, new ideas with ease but absorbed and built upon them.

Nolan sharply captures the unparalleled genius of Oppenheimer, the man credited for inventing the atomic bomb. Interweaving vignettes from Oppenheimer’s rise to stardom and his subsequent fall from grace, the film deftly conveys the scientist’s multifaceted life.