Perhaps it’s surprising for Ed Solomon, the screenwriter most known for penning commercial fare like Men in Black and Now You See Me, to offer such an elegant, intimate script with The Christophers, directed by the unfailingly productive Steven Soderbergh. Solomon has collaborated with Soderbergh before on the film No Sudden Move and two television series, Full Circle and Mosaic. There’s a verbose richness to Solomon’s text and Soderbergh’s cool visual flair that works wonderfully together here.

An artist and art restorer, Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who also hustles part-time working at a food truck, is hired by two siblings, Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), to finish and forge a series of famous paintings titled “The Christophers” by their estranged, aging father, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), so they can sell them for a high price after his death. Julian was once an artist of notable stature but began to slum it, co-hosting a fictional reality competition TV show titled Art Fight and delivering barbed criticisms to up-and-coming artists a la Simon Cowell. In the present day, Julian lives in side-by-side brownstones. (Interestingly, one is strewn with curiosities and art hanging on the walls, while the other, save for a messy attic, is starker—reflective of Julian’s muddled psyche and the dualities that emerge over the course of the film.) For extra cash, he makes online Cameo videos in his cluttered, musty-looking art studio, dabs of paintbrush strokes dotting the walls and a ring light illuminating his computer screen.

When Lori enters Julian’s home, she pretends she’s there to be an assistant. The two are immediately at odds generationally and in terms of temperament. Lori is taut and tight-lipped, smartly dressed in a pale-yellow coat and buttoned-up Oxford shirt. (Soderbergh always has an eye for subtle contemporary costuming, here working with costume designer Eleanor Baker.) Julian is a mess, rambling and railing against art schools and the ills of society, wearing a loose-fitting, unbuttoned robe that exposes his torso. At first, he doesn’t remember her and isn’t suspicious of why she has been hired by his daughter and son, but he soon realizes the truth—creating fascinating tension and an unlikely potential friendship between the two.

In some ways, The Christophers echoes Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters. In both, unexpected outsiders upend the existence of a washed-up queer artist played by McKellen, who delivers equally masterful performances as the fictional Julian Sklar and real-life director James Whale. Here, he is extraordinarily commanding, moving through dense text with prowess and ease (just behold the way he stresses the words “should” and “shouldn’t” so surprisingly and eloquently in one of his monologues).

He is well-matched by Coel—an unbridled revelation in TV’s I May Destroy You—who is steely and internal here. Gunning and Corden are seemingly well-cast as Julian’s conniving children, but the siblings come off as simplistic, bumbling Disney villains and are the weakest aspects of what is otherwise a layered, intricate film. Corden’s character name could be an in-joke reference to one of the film’s art consultants, Barnaby Gorton, who painted the beautiful, sepia-toned “Christophers.”

According to Solomon at a post-screening Q&A, the film was a brisk, 19-day shoot. Though a small-scale picture, it’s still an impressive feat given the exquisite lead performances, rich dialogue, and the moving, unexpected turns the storyline takes.