For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film’s most spectacular attraction turns out to something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen just as often. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan’s primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico’s desert panoramas but, far more often, to contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Closeup after closeup shows star Cillian Murphy’s face staring into the middle distance,  offscreen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, or waking nightmares. “Oppenheimer” rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people’s faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they’ve done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the closeups of people’s faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven’t happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don’t just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer’s team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer’s life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The “fissile” cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer’s career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film’s interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer’s, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Los Alamos’ military supervisor; Robert’s suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer, whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer’s post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he’s a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what “Oppenheimer” is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war, the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it’s not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both Asian viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and reactionary Americans who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn’t indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do—dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit, in an aesthetically daring way—while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that’s about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about “Oppenheimer.” It’s not entirely about Oppenheimer. even though Murphy’s baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It’s also about the effect of Oppenheimer’s personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Sadie’s Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, who has some of Gloria Grahame’s self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn’t going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic “crybaby” who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame’s editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick-y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It’s wedded to virtually nonstop music by Ludwig Göransson that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that’s probably what it would feel like to read “American Prometheus” while listening to a playlist of Philip Glass’s film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it’s like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one’s own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn’t really delved much into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn’t important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the story, itself but how the filmmaker tells it. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated, but ultimately muddled and simplistic blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stores. But whether that characterization was ever entirely true (and I’m increasingly convinced that it never was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it’s been applied to a biography of a real person. It seems possible that “Oppenheimer” could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director’s filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he’d been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward, using them to explore the innermost recesses of the mind and heart, not just to move human pieces around on a series of interlinked, multi-dimensional storytelling boards.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it’s as if the park bench scene in “JFK” had been expanded to three hours). There’s also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife vacation there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented by the presence of “Full Metal Jacket” star Matthew Modine, who costars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) As an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, “Oppenheimer” draws on Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “The Pawnbroker,” “All That Jazz” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock“; and, inevitably, “Citizen Kane” (there’s even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). Most of the performances have a bit of an “old movie” feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered so quickly, with the lines sometimes slightly overlapping, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet.

But as a physical experience, “Oppenheimer” is something else entirely—it’s hard to say exactly what, and that’s what’s so fascinating about it. I’ve already heard complaints that the movie is “too long,” that it could’ve ended with the first bomb detonating, and could’ve done without the bits about Oppenheimer’s sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it’s perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower’s cabinet. But the film’s furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how’s and why’s of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are on trial, or appearing before a tribunal, and being called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The real tribunal is out there in the dark. We’ve been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

It takes a certain kind of person to be a free diver. All need not apply. Not everyone wants to plunge into the blackness of the ocean without oxygen, pushing the limits of the human body, swimming what is essentially the height of the Statue of Liberty twice, once down, once back up. These people are “built different,” as they say, and, similar to big-wave surfers or any athlete devoted to extreme sports, are not afraid of the things most humans fear. They run towards the limits. Life-or-death risk is built in.

Laura McGann’s documentary “The Deepest Breath” profiles Alessia Zecchini, an Italian free diver determined to break the world record, and Stephen Keenan, a skilled safety diver (who accompanies the free divers partway down, to help in case something goes wrong). “The Deepest Breath” is a visual stunner, with intimidatingly beautiful underwater photography showing tiny humans surrounded by the vast underwater world, a forbidding space of blues moving into blacks. The visuals give you an awe-inspiring and terrifying idea of what these people experience, what they seek and crave. The pursuit is psychological as much as it is physical. Former world champion free diver Natalia Molchanova said in an interview, “Mental relaxation is the foundation of free diving.” The sport requires you to empty yourself of everything except in-the-moment consciousness. Anything else takes too much energy.

“The Deepest Breath” introduces us to Zecchini and Keenan on alternating narrative tracks. From Italy and Ireland, respectively, Zecchini and Keenan had very different life trajectories: one was driven to be a free diver from a very young age, and the other spent his youth wandering the world, searching for something, but he didn’t know what exactly. Keenan then discovered free diving and was instantly hooked. Zecchini and Keenan are heard in voiceover in interview and podcast clips. The past tense used by other interview subjects shows where this is going (in case you aren’t up to speed on the real-life events).

Zecchini was inspired as a child by the example of Molchanova, whose feats remain legendary, who set records not broken for years and years. Zecchini was still in grade school when she decided she wanted to be a world champion. In 2015, Molchanova disappeared during a dive off the coast of Ibiza. She went down and never came back up. Shockwaves reverberated through the freediving community. Zecchini realized, for the first time, she could die doing this thing she loved. This tripped her up mentally. She said, hauntingly, in one interview, “It’s black. It’s dark. You feel locked inside.” 

Zecchini was so ambitious it made her tense and temperamental. She pushed herself too hard. Even other free divers thought so. But then, in 2017, during a competition in the Bahamas at the Vertical Blue, Zecchini met Keenan in his capacity as a safety diver. He offered to train her after Zecchini blacked out on successive dives. She flourished and broke a world record three days later (102 meters). The following day, her record was broken by Japanese phenom Hanako Hirose (103 meters), which pushed Alessia to break Hirose’s record the following day (104 meters). This triumphant experience solidified the bond between Zecchini and Keenan. “The Deepest Breath” is also a love story.

The pressure of the deep ocean is hell on the human body. Divers risk brain damage and permanent lung damage. There is something called a “lung squeeze,” and you really don’t want it to happen to you. Divers often black out underwater and must be rushed to the surface by the safety divers. CPR is administered while everyone is still in the water: there’s no time even to haul the diver up into the boat. There is traumatic footage of the moments when divers re-emerge to the surface, and they flail, their faces and bodies frozen in a full-body seize. Free divers wear wet suits and monofins, making them look like superhero mermaids as they undulate into the black. The pressure pulling divers down is called a “free fall.” Divers say it feels like flying.

McGann pulled together as much extant footage as possible from the various competitions, plus Zecchini and Keenan’s video recordings, video blogs, Instagram stories, etc. They documented their lives. Other free divers weigh in, and there are some conventional “talking head” interviews, particularly with the fathers of both Zecchini and Keenan, pained men who had to let their children go, who had to let them pursue this very dangerous thing, incomprehensible to most, but essential for the happiness of their children. Since free divers are followed by a hearty talented group of underwater cinematographers, there is existing footage of many of the dives. There are many famous spots free divers gravitate towards, the “vertical blue” in the Bahamas and the terrifying “blue hole” in Dahab, Egypt, with its deadly “arch.” The arch is the most dangerous place on earth for a free diver (“More dangerous than Mount Everest,” says one of the free divers). If you can make it through the arch and back up, you stand with the greats.

“The Deepest Breath” is haunting and eerie in tone, with hair-raising shots of divers swimming down down down, their bodies moving in one continuous rippling motion until they disappear into the blackness near the bottom. Zecchini and Keenan are almost otherworldly underwater, but topside, they are down-to-earth and fun-loving, free-spirited, and wild. Each found a kindred spirit in the other. Free diving is such a small community. When something happens to one, it happens to all.

Molchanova described what it was like at such a depth: “It’s like being in the last quiet place on earth.” Eloquent and moving, “The Deepest Breath” shows what it’s like “down there,” why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface. 

On Netflix now.