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Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer streams exclusively on Peacock. It follows physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer from his graduate studies through his leadership of the Manhattan Project. Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer, a performance that won him the Academy Award for best actor. The film took home seven Oscars total, including best picture and best director.
The screenplay draws directly from American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It tracks two timelines at once. One follows the race to build and test the first nuclear weapon at Los Alamos, New Mexico, culminating in the Trinity test in July 1945. The other, shot in black and white, follows a 1954 security clearance hearing. In that hearing, Oppenheimer was stripped of his access to government secrets after his earlier ties to left-wing political circles were used against him during the McCarthy era.
Robert Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, the Atomic Energy Commission chairman whose rivalry with Oppenheimer drives much of the film’s second half. Downey won best supporting actor for the role. Emily Blunt plays Kitty Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh appears as Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist Oppenheimer was involved with before the war.
What makes the true story angle worth noting years later is a detail that arrived after release. The 1954 ruling against Oppenheimer stood as the official government position on his loyalty for nearly seven decades. In December 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy formally vacated that decision. It restored Oppenheimer’s security clearance after his death and acknowledged that the original hearing was flawed and politically motivated. Nolan’s film, in theaters the following year, arrived just as that reversal was still working its way through public memory. That gives the courtroom scenes an outcome the audience can already confirm was wrong.
At just over three hours, Oppenheimer is a long sit. It moves briskly by cutting between the physics, the politics, and the personal cost to Oppenheimer’s marriage and reputation. Viewers looking for the clearest single film about how the atomic age began will find this the most detailed option currently streaming. It is told from the physicist’s perspective, rather than from the generals who deployed the weapon.
