The Brooklyn Rail

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… “that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” The second part of the saying is usually omitted, because clearly it complicates the compliment. If someone copies your work a little too well, are they paying you homage or stealing your aura? Should you feel heartened or threatened? Inspired or insulted?

The Christophers arrives at a moment when these questions feel newly urgent, as fears around the implications of AI continue to escalate. Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) is recruited to complete once-famous painter Julian Sklar’s (Ian McKellen) unfinished—and therefore mysterious and lucrative—Christopher portrait series. Julian’s incompetent and opportunistic children (played by Jessica Gunning and James Corden) are desperate, but Lori is not indifferent to their cause. She has her own reasons for being intrigued by the scheme.

Lori teaches art and works at a food truck, while the fading Julian survives on recording celebrity cameo videos. Both artists are prickly, fiery, and proud, playing off each other’s defenses. One hides behind guardedness, the other behind bravado.

There is a certain humiliation in trying to survive as an artist; the line between pride and desperation is always so thin. Lori initially presents herself as Julian’s assistant, but he suspects her motives and soon uncovers her true agenda. At first offended, he comes to see that Lori is his most loyal fan. At one point he baits her, telling her she should “get [her] own mindset. Don’t squat in mine.” But he's old and lonely and, in truth, craves good company. He can’t help but be drawn to the honesty that can puncture his bluster.

Being seen is rarely pleasurable. In fact, it can be profoundly painful, even while it offers a privileged sort of catharsis. Lori understands Julian because she’s studied his work so obsessively, and is disappointed because she knows how far he’s fallen. Her criticism thus comes from a place of care, not contempt. If Lori proves capable of forging his style — which she is—it is not out of some mercenary ambition, but rather deep admiration for the way Julian was once able to give form to his life and life to his forms.

Ultimately the film dwells in ambiguity, emphasizing that what matters most is the relationship forged between the two artists, and not the ethics of authorship as adjudicated from some outside perspective.

In this sense, the film recalls the argument made decades ago by Roland Barthes in his essay “The Death of the Author.” For Barthes, meaning does not belong solely to the creator. Rather, it emerges co-constructively between a work and its audience. In The Christophers, Lori’s understanding of Julian’s art is so intimate that authorship becomes a secondary, even trivial concern: she knows his work—and therefore him—better than he knows himself. Julian is lost, but only Lori can help him see that. Legacy lives on through its most sincere interpretations, and in this case, Lori is less a trespasser than a scribe—an inheritor who embodies, interprets, and reinvigorates her predecessor.

The question of creative agency feels particularly resonant today. Whose integrity matters more: the artist, their art, or the audience? In an age of algorithmically generated images and infinite digital reproduction, debates over homage versus theft, creation versus exploitation, and imitation versus inspiration are no longer abstract. The problem with “slopification,” however, is that most people are not Lori: they have not spent years studying the artists whose styles they imitate, and their intentions are rarely so pure.

“Good writers borrow; great writers steal,” said T. S. Eliot (and most English professors ever since). But theft, by Eliot’s definition, requires absorption: the artist must first internalize what they borrow before transforming it. In The Christophers, the process of absorption is legible through Lori. Her capacity for imitation is not mere mimicry, but the product of years spent learning about the artist as much as the art. Their relationship never resolves into simple mentorship. It is marked by friction as well as affinity, with clashes that double as admiration, and challenges that function as permission. Each becomes for the other a condition of possibility.

Compare this with the 2009 film Julie & Julia, in which Amy Adams plays a blogger who cooks all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook. The project launches her career, but Child—still alive—disapproves. Lori’s story, by contrast, foregrounds a more morally satisfying dynamic: imitation that begins as betrayal slowly evolves into mutual recognition.

Still, some of the moral ease with which we historically permitted borrowing comes from the simple fact that its originators are no longer here to protest. Julian’s impending death highlights this caveat. In facing mortality, he comes to see Lori’s involvement not as provocative exploitation, but necessary preservation. Forced to confront his own regrets, Julian grows more lenient, recognizing that priorities shift when the stakes are existential.

In this sense, Lori is not just a reader or interpreter, but a steward, ensuring his vision endures. Her involvement complicates the idea of sole authorship, because she, a previously separate entity of viewership, suddenly becomes integral. Her role as “audience” moves from passive observer to central participant. This tension reframes legacy as an ongoing negotiation in how meaning gets legitimized. A work may be yours in the making, but it belongs to others in its living.

Tonally, The Christophers sits somewhere between the metafictional authorship puzzles of Stranger Than Fiction and the art-world caper energy of The Mastermind. Like many of Soderbergh’s smaller experiments, the film is a modest, actor-driven project built around a clever premise—closer in scale to High Flying Bird than Ocean’s Eight. The pacing occasionally drags and some of the dialogue strains for wit, but the performances carry it through. Much of The Christophers unfolds like a chamber play between McKellen and Coel. McKellen relishes in delivering tasty barbs—“I was bisexual, Lori, when it actually cost something”— while Coel counters with her signature withering, unblinking stare. Both actors bring formidable artistic cachet, with McKellen fresh off experimental projects like the VR stage piece An Ark by the Shed and Tin Drum, and Coel returning to the screen after a hiatus from the critical triumph of I May Destroy You. Their friction gives the film its electricity.

What Lori ultimately demonstrates is that imitation, at its best, is an act of paying attention. To reproduce another artist’s work convincingly requires more than technical skill: it requires sensitivity to the emotional logic behind every choice. The Christophers ask us to think less about ownership, and more about the relationships art creates between artists, audiences, and time. Just as Julian and Lori gradually come to feel seen by one another, so creation proves to be a complicated entanglement between a work and its audience. The result is a tight, engaging film attuned to the anxieties surrounding influence and authorship today. How much does ownership really matter? And what do we, as artists and audiences, truly want?