Michaela Coel (Lori Butler) and Ian McKellen (Julian Sklar) in The Christophers. Photo: Claudette Barius
(15, 100 mins, in cinemas)
Some artists hardly need to sign their work; their style is identifiable at a single glance. Others display virtuosity through versatility, and American film-maker Steven Soderbergh is that latter kind. His chameleonic career includes the glossy, star-studded Ocean’s Eleven franchise, the gritty drug-trade drama Traffic, sexless male stripper saga Magic Mike and several indie curios besides. Now he’s donning the earth-toned smock of a finely crafted British drama. But if there’s no distinct personality in the brush-stroke, then is it really art?
Michaela Coel stars as Lori Butler, a talented art school graduate who makes ends meet between freelance restoration gigs and working in a Chinese food truck by the Tower of London. It’s in the former capacity that Lori is sought out by siblings Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee “heirs abhorrent” to an aging superstar artist named Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen).
‘Lucian Freud meets Damien Hirst, with a touch of the Gordon Ramsays’: Ian McKellen as artist Julian Sklar. Photo: Claudette Barius
Sklar is imagined as Lucian Freud meets Damien Hirst, with a touch of the Gordon Ramsays. He’s past his prime and borderline cancelled, yet his work can still fetch millions at auction. Some of these – the “Christophers” of the title – he has stashed away, unseen and unfinished, in his attic, but Sallie and Barnaby have a money-grubbing scheme to retrieve and sell them. That’s where Lori comes in, with her talent for restoration – or should that be forgery?
What is the nature of artistic talent? Does it reside in the individual or in the ether? Can it be imitated or replicated? These questions – summarised in the well-worn “ah … but is it art?” refrain – shade every aspect of The Christophers, with the possible exception of Michaela Coel’s spectacular, sculptural face: that is art, no question.
When she shares a frame with McKellen, the two throw each other into gorgeous relief. It is a performance partnership which somehow feels equally weighted, even when Lori is silent and being subjected to one of Sklar’s brilliantly barbed soliloquies, which he aims at his critics and admirers alike. (“No dear, your fucked-up childhood made you want to be an artist; I’m just what you tripped over, as you scurried to freedom.”)
Sklar gets most of the best lines. ‘Weinstein has ruined the dressing gown for the rest of us,’ he says after appearing en déshabillé at the top of the stairs
Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising, then, to learn that the previous credits of screenwriter Ed Solomon include the 70s US sitcom Laverne & Shirley, the Bill & Ted films and Men in Black, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Of all these iconic double acts, Coel ’n’ McKellen is both the most unlikely and the most elucidating. Through a series of conversations taking place around Sklar’s vast central London home, the two negotiate differences of race, age and gender, hitting all the hot buttons along the way, from polyamory to cancel culture. (It’s the same formula that the TV show Hacks has successfully mined for five seasons, only with painting, not standup, as the nexus of their interaction.)
‘The Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee “heirs abhorrent” to aging superstar artist Sklar,’: Jessica Gunning (Sallie) and James Corden (Barnaby) in The Christophers. Photo: Claudette Barius
Property wealth is one intergenerational sore point that doesn’t get an airing. Sklar has not one house, but two; and his attic alone could be a one-bedroom flat, renting for upwards of £7,000 a month in today’s market. But this may be a London-specific grumble, and one suspects the red buses and Georgian townhouses of The Christophers are mostly aimed at the tourists. Real Londoners would no more take this depiction seriously than they would fork out £15 for two spring rolls from a Tower of London food truck.
Sklar also gets most of the best lines. “Weinstein has ruined the dressing gown for the rest of us,” he says after appearing en déshabillé at the top of the stairs. But the film otherwise evinces a baseline respect for millennial and gen Z mores that’s often absent from these generation-gap comedies. And anyway, what’s most interesting about Lori and Julian is not their expected differences, but their surprising shared ground.
Via different routes, both have arrived in a place beyond ego. He because the art world exploited him and now he’s reduced to caricaturing himself on Cameo and delivering sub-Simon Cowell snark on a rubbish reality show. She because, when faced with setbacks, she gave up too soon and then betrayed her own talent for fast cash.
All that’s left is to make work of value, regardless of what it fetches at auction, or who gets credited. This self-effacement can be a productive starting point for paint-by-numbers entertainment – “the fact that I'm not an identifiable brand is very freeing," Soderbergh said in 2009 – but as art, it feels like something is missing. The spark of original creation, perhaps?
Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025.