J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, overseeing the scientists who built the first atomic bomb, and this film traces his path from a promising young physicist studying in Europe to the man tasked with turning theoretical physics into a weapon. Archival photographs, wartime footage, and interviews with historians cover the Manhattan Project's race against Nazi Germany, the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that followed. The film does not stop at 1945: it follows Oppenheimer into the postwar years, when he became one of the loudest voices warning against the hydrogen bomb and nuclear proliferation, a stance that cost him his security clearance during the McCarthy era. Told through his personal correspondence and the recollections of colleagues, the documentary weighs the scientist who made the weapon possible against the man who spent the rest of his career trying to contain what he had helped create.