‘The Christophers’ Review: Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel Are Brilliantly Matched in Steven Soderbergh’s Sly Look at Artistic Legacy

Some things you simply can’t fake. Take talent: There’s no room for anything shy of genius in “The Christophers,” a crackling original drama about artistic legacy in all its facets, directed by Steven Soderbergh, from a script by Ed Solomon (“No Sudden Move”) and starring two top-notch English actors of wildly different backgrounds and styles, Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel, at the top of their respective games.

Sharp as he’s ever been six decades after making his West End debut, McKellen plays a bad-boy British art star who’s about to kick the bucket, while Coel is the astonishingly good young painter tasked with finishing eight canvases he abandoned many years earlier. Each of the known paintings from Sklar’s Christopher series has fetched $3 million or more at auction, and adult kids (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) know there are eight more locked away on the top floor of his apartment. So they figure, ask Lori to pose as their dad’s new assistant, and she can sneak in, steal the paintings and put the finishing touches on them.

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What Lori winds up doing is a lot more complicated. It amounts to several days of mental jousting with the man/monster who made her want to be an artist in the first place. The thing is, though Sklar may have inspired her, he went on to crush her dreams just as her career was starting (as a judge on the “Art Fight” series, where he humiliated the 19-year-old Lori on national TV). So there are a lot of levels on which “The Christophers” could unfold. Lori holds the power to restore not only Sklar’s work, but also his reputation. But she could also take her revenge and humiliate him once he’s gone.

In the end, “The Christophers” is less about forgery than “forging through” things “until they’re completed” — at least, that’s the excuse Sklar’s greedy heirs use to justify hiring Lori for what amounts to an extremely complicated counterfeiting job. But Sklar, who has a terminal illness and not long to live, has lots that has been left undone in his life. He’s mistreated so many people, not least of all Christopher, the lover who fueled all those invaluable paintings and whose feelings for whom clearly evolved over the course of that series. So amends are in order, to that man, his family and others, like Lori, he stepped on along the way.

She shows up at his apartment — two side-by-side flats in a once-bohemian London street — to interview as Sklar’s assistant, and he does all the talking. Sklar loves the sound of his own voice, as do we, for this is the great Sir Ian McKellen sinking his teeth into Solomon’s delicious dialogue. Now in his 80s, Sklar hasn’t painted anything of worth in almost three decades, though he earns good money recording personalized video greetings for fans (a modern detail that gives the sometimes play-like script an up-to-the-moment zing). He’s decided that none of his estate will pass to his kids, and he’s smart enough to sniff out what they’re up to, even if he couldn’t have guessed the exact nature of Lori’s assignment.

Sklar seems delighted to have a fresh audience, bloviating almost without interruption, nearly all of which Lori absorbs with a poker face. As two-handers go, this one’s sharp as they come — a cross between Anthony Shaffer’s brilliant “Sleuth” and that most mind-blowing of all British films, 1970’s “Performance,” in which James Fox and Mick Jagger trade identities. McKellen gets to chew the scenery, walking around in highly inappropriate states of undress, his drooping figure no longer capable of seducing, though Sklar’s mind seems as determined to do so as when he was in his prime. By contrast, Coel’s performance is dialed down to self-protective body language and bemused microexpressions — tiny clues as Lori studies this fallen idol of hers and decides his fate.

Among other things, Lori represents the new generation: a queer Black woman whose well-founded criticisms are far more circumspect than the unfiltered white man for whom she works. Her intelligence comes through via a withering essay she wrote on Sklar, as well as a critical monologue in which Lori demonstrates why she’s uniquely qualified to complete those paintings of his. Careful not to overstate the “woke” elements of her character, the script lets Lori dissect the misogyny and hypocrisy of this dinosaur, whose “only outrage against cancel culture came after he had been canceled himself.”

Soderbergh only allows that dimension to develop so far. This isn’t “After the Hunt,” after all, but a more evenly matched mind game. Soderbergh has always been great at orchestrating slick schemes and con jobs in which audiences have no trouble rooting for the criminals, from “Out of Sight” to “Ocean’s Eleven” to 2009’s underrated “The Informant!” But “The Christophers” essentially skips past the mechanics of art fraud — if anything, it would have been great to see more of Lori’s technique, which is hinted at in a couple quick montages — to consider whether Sklar is the actual fraud here.

Solomon, whose mother is a painter, has drawn inspiration from radical artists of 1960s, such as David Hockney, whose portraits of then-muse Peter Schlesinger (the man in so many of his pool paintings) are the most obvious model for “The Christophers.” To whom do those works belong? Are they private acts, as Sklar believes, painted alone in his room, which he then chooses to share — in which case, it’s clearly his choice whether to destroy the eight unfinished works, as he orders Lori to do. Or do they belong to the world, and if so, does it matter if he’s even the one who made them?

“The Christophers” raises all kinds of interesting questions, but it’s not without answers, including one that might humbly be called the meaning of life: “to last in the minds of others.” But that’s not the whole picture — for an artist, at least — this eloquent movie reveals. Not being forgotten is one thing; what matters more is how we are remembered.