The clue to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was there all along. In Tenet, his 2020 time-travel/espionage drama, John David Washington’s nameless spy is lectured on the Manhattan Project (a top-secret development of the atomic bomb during World War II) which was overseen by one J Robert Oppenheimer. ‘As they approached the first atomic test,’ he’s told, ‘Oppenheimer became concerned that the detonation might produce a chain reaction.’ Coincidence? In Nolan’s universe, anything is possible.

In fact, it was Charles Roven who first planted the seed. The veteran producer who worked on Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises), convinced him to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that this new film was ultimately based on. Published in 2005, Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J Robert Oppenheimer was a book some 25 years in the making. Sherwin spent two decades meticulously researching the world of Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who changed the 20th century.

Clocking in at three hours, Oppenheimer marks the first biopic of Nolan’s singular career, one that’s seen the British-American filmmaker turn his cerebral mindset into cinematic spectacle; films like Inception, with its espionage-tinged tale about a group that penetrate dreams, or the time-bending sci-fi Interstellar, which saw him collaborate with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne. Increasingly, Nolan’s interest in the science that underpins our world has come to dominate his work, culminating here in Oppenheimer.

In the film, Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer. A Nolan regular (dating all the way back to his villainous Scarecrow in 2005’s Batman Begins), this acclaimed Irish actor now steps up to play his first lead for the director. Around him is a fabulous cast, including Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty; Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s mistress; Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project; Josh Hartnett as physicist Ernest Lawrence; and Gary Oldman as President Harry S Truman.

When Nolan presented footage at CinemaCon, the Las Vegas-based event where studios showcase upcoming movies, he said, ‘like it or not, J Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived . . . he made the world that we live in, for better or for worse.’ Within a month of the Trinity test (the first ever detonation of a nuclear weapon, held in the New Mexico desert), the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killing thousands, it effectively brought World War II to an end, but ushered in a new era of nuclear paranoia.

When he witnessed the Trinity test, Oppenheimer famously said, ‘now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, quoting from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. What makes his story so fascinating is how, in later years, he became a critic of such weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, in 1954 at the height of the Communist witch-hunts, he was turned on by his own government. The United States Atomic Energy Commission, led by Lewis Strauss (played in the film by Robert Downey Jr) subjected him to a hearing that ultimately resulted in his security clearance being revoked.

If all of this offers Nolan huge dramatic possibilities, Oppenheimer also throws enormous visual challenges at its director. Ever since The Dark Knight, he’s shot sequences with IMAX cameras, providing the richest images you can possibly achieve for a big screen.

This time, Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema (his cinematographer dating back to 2014’s Interstellar) are breaking new ground, shooting IMAX sequences in black-and-white as well as colour. No major movie has shot in IMAX black-and-white before, simply because the film stock didn’t exist. Kodak manufactured it specifically for Oppenheimer.

Nolan last shot monochrome scenes for Memento, his 2000 breakthrough film which cast Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a vengeance-fuelled man with short-term memory loss. Intriguingly, the colour segments were the more subjective scenes inside Shelby’s fractured world; when it turned to black and white, it offered a more objective look at this character.

Nolan is again using the same technique for Oppenheimer, suggesting this might yet be the most complex character study of his career to date. In another summer of sequels and comic-book movies, his film will surely be the brainiest kid on the block.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas from Friday 21 July.