In “Oppenheimer,”Christopher Nolantakes an eggheady topic and, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, turns it into a gut-level experience. He shows that the kind of hyper, jacked-up, ultramodern filmmaking associated with the action and superhero genres can be harnessed in the service of a smart, serious movie.

This is as supercharged as any of Nolan’s genre movies, such as his Batman “Dark Knight” trilogy, but this time Nolan is lavishing three hours on the life of a theoretical physicist. J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” is the subject, and Nolan isn’t just concentrating on the atomic bomb drama, but on the man’s thoughts, feelings, relationships and postwar difficulties. Yet not a minute of the movie is less than interesting, and much of it is riveting.

“Oppenheimer” feels as though it were put together intuitively. It zigzags through the scientist’s story, showing him interchangeably as a student, as the victim of a postwar investigation and as a professor at UC Berkeley (where he and his colleagues have the good sense to read The Chronicle). The investigation — a 1954 hearing to determine whether to renew his federal security clearance — is the movie’s spine, giving Nolan license to introduce topics and bounce through time in all directions.

The Oppenheimer we find here is a strange guy, a man of science as driven as the most passionate artist. He’s too smart to sleep, tormented by visions of the cosmos, and, as played by Cillian Murphy (“Peaky Blinders,” Nolan’s “Batman Begins”), who became almost skeletal for the role, he’s too smart to eat.

His point of connection with the audience is his integrity. He really does seem to care about the people in his life — his friends, family, including his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), who worked with him on the Manhattan Project and laterfounded the Exploratoriumin San Francisco — and humankind in general. All this, and he has a really good look too, kind of like David Bowie in his Thin White Duke period, only 30 years earlier and with the addition of a porkpie hat. If you’re trying to figure out how to blow up the world, you might as well look cool doing it.

The story the film tells is enormous. Oppenheimer, who has the privilege and burden of being one of the smartest people in the world, realizes the potential for nuclear weapons before most people, but not before at least one Nazi scientist. By the time he is appointed director of the Manhattan Project, tasked with creating the first atomic bomb, the United States is in a mortal game of catch-up.

Realizing it would be difficult to recruit the best scientists if they had to leave their families, he builds Los Alamos from scratch, a New Mexico community that serves as his base of operations. There, Oppenheimer is placed under the command of Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, and the two men are a study of contrasts: an intelligent normal man in charge of an eccentric genius.

It’s Groves’ challenge, beautifully played byMatt Damon, to figure out when to trust his own judgment and when to trust Oppenheimer. The complicating factor is that Oppenheimer is not always right. He’s naive when it comes to the Soviets, and he has close friendships with American communists, including a troubled romance with a neurotic party member played byFlorence Pugh. Oppenheimer seems to have been attracted to fierce women, which means juicy roles for Pugh and forEmily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife.

In fact, there are many small, vivid roles in “Oppenheimer,” such that three different best actor Academy Award winners —Rami Malek,Casey AffleckandGary Oldman— have one good scene each. The latter, who played Winston Churchill in “The Darkest Hour,” is President Harry Truman here. If Oldman ever plays Stalin, he could do the Potsdam Conference as a one-man show.

“Oppenheimer” also provides an opportunity for audiences to remember thatRobert Downey Jr.is an actor, and not just a self-parody in superhero movies. Maybe it was a chance for Downey to remember too. In a superb portrayal of small-minded spite, he plays Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission who, out of jealousy, became Oppenheimer’s nemesis.

More than most movies, “Oppenheimer” is difficult to describe in words. Nolan uses color for the early scenes and black and white for the later scenes, and throughout, the movie is so vigorously directed, not only in terms of sight but also sound, that probably the best a critic can do is point you toward the experience and say, “It’sthat.”

不过,必须强调的是the sheer, utter brilliance of Nolan’s depiction of the first atomic bomb detonation. Nolan brings everything to bear on this sequence, stretching out moments, increasing the sound, wiping out the sound, and taking time to bask in the horrifying beauty of the destruction. What marks him as an artist, and not just a dazzling technician, is that amid the sound and fury, we feel the moral implications of the moment in all their awful complexity.

That is nothing less than great filmmaking.

Reach Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.