It’s fair to say that Dunkirk is not a frontrunner for the best picture Oscar: it contains no showpiece, emotion-arousing acting performances, it eulogises a wartime episode that doesn’t really register on US consciousnesses as it does in Britain, and – on first sight – it’s a big fat commercial movie of the kind that rarely makes inroads at the top end of the Academy Awards. Its reported budget, $100m, is twice as much as the next highest (The Post, $50m), and it has become clear over time that Oscar voters like a scrappy, up-and-at-’em production rather than one that can spend its way out of trouble.

There may be a whiff of stodginess about its basic subject matter – and indeed, Brexit-endorsing little-Englanderness – that puts it in the same bracket as Darkest Hour. (Can it be a coincidence that two period films set in exactly the same year and hinging on the same historical events should get best picture nominations at the same time?) Other contenders – Get Out, Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird – clearly have the edge in freshness of perspective. But for all that, Dunkirk has a great chance. In basic terms, this is a passion project from a highly successful film-maker operating at the top of his game, taking a genuine risk for something he clearly feels very strongly about. While it would be a stretch to say that Christopher Nolan might have derailed his entire career if it had failed, it likely would have been a major black mark and forced him back to safety-first sci-fi or comic-book films with his tail between his legs.

For Nolan really has gone out on a limb with this one. Dunkirk is about as unconventional and stylistically high-minded a mainstream war movie as there’s ever been. For a start, there’s hardly any actual combat in it, at least compared with the likes of Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, which envisioned the Pacific theatre as some kind of bone-liquidising hellstorm. Apart from a surreally unpopulated ambush at the start and some weirdly ecstatic aerial missions flown by Tom Hardy and his RAF chums, there’s little of the human destruction that most war films – even stone-cold masterpieces such as Come and See or Apocalypse Now – routinely offer up.

This is clearly a deliberate tactic by Nolan, to approximate what he considers the authenticity of the events: the (relatively) orderly evacuation of a defeated army, each soldier patiently waiting their turn on the beach. The temptation and pressure to shoehorn in some sort of climactic made-up battle must have been intense. But, as Nolan said in an interview with the Guardian, in the end, “it’s a defeat”. Its dominant mode, therefore, is elegiac rather than heroic; for a war film in the current political climate it is nothing short of remarkable.

Nolan’s anti-action theme also has the curious effect of converting his film into something of a tone poem: mood and rhythm, accentuated by the impressive soundtrack, become the film’s prevailing forces. Moreover – and this again was surely Nolan’s intention – this forces the audience’s attention to the tiny details and subtleties of each individual world that the film engages with: the airman floating in the clouds, the sailor navigating the choppy seas, the infantrymen cowering on the sand. In this context, Nolan’s final sequence – which has attracted considerable criticism for its Brexity evocation of a twee, cosy-fireside Englishness – makes a little more sense, and is not quite the Farage-esque setpiece it may appear on first sight.

But what the Oscar voters may admire most about Dunkirk is that it shows Nolan is prepared to put his money where his mouth is. There’s a good reason why superhero films don’t win Oscars: for all their fire and fury, their furrowed-brow moralising can’t disguise their emotional and spiritual vacuousness. Nolan, having been the pioneer of the overwrought-but-empty comic book movie, has finally managed to break the carapace of big-budget studio movie-making and create a film on a human, intimate scale. Given the world-shaking events that are its backdrop, that’s some achievement. With a bit of good fortune, Nolan might turn defeat into victory on Oscar night.