Netflix couldn’t get its hands on the Oscar favorite “Oppenheimer,” so they cleverly chose to put a little money behind “Einstein and the Bomb,” a primer on “The Father of Modern Physics,” Albert Einstein.

The physicist was played by Tom Conti in “Oppenheimer,” where we note his connection to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project team, and his general lack of involvement in the race to develop an atomic bomb.

“Einstein and the Bomb” is a docudrama that explains Einstein’s role in splitting the atom, the theory that made it possible, his refugee wanderings after escaping Nazi Germany and the letter he signed that inspired the United States government to go all-in on this race, in which Germany had a perceived head start.

Veteran Irish character actor Aidan McArdle (“The Professor and the Madman”) plays Einstein, reading from his writings, recreating speeches and conversations in scenes that are interspersed with a sea of archival footage of the history unfolding around Einstein and the occasional snippet of the real Albert Einstein on film.

Anthony Philipson and Anne Mensah’s film has a whiff of “quick and dirty” about it, although it’s far more polished than your average History Channel docudrama treatment of such a subject.

We learn of the pacifism of “The Father of the Atomic Age,” his credo that “concern for man himself” “must always ben the chief objective in order that the creations of our minds should be a blessing and not a curse to mankind.”

We glimpse, in cleverly-conceived flashbacks, how a very young Albert (Jay Lewis Mitchell) got a handle on relativity and the speed of light by visualizing an 1890s street scene (rear projected) swooshing by him as he sprinted towards that speed of light.

Archival TV documentaries from Britain and the U.S. illustrate the E = mc² equation in easy to understand ways.

And we hear of a late-life debate, by letter, between Einstein and Japanese journalist Katsu Hara (Leo Ashizawa) in which the reporter implores Einstein to accept responsibility for his role in the bombs that ended Japanese imperialism and aggression forever.

Anyone familiar with Japan’s embrace of victimhood and slow acceptance of evidence of its WWII barbarism and inhumanity is allowed a big fat eye-roll at Hara’s 1955 insistence that his country is “showing sincere repentence for the crimes” committed by their people in their name from 1931-1945.

What was most interesting to me is the film’s painstaking recounting of Einstein’s fame and reception in Germany just after World War I, how the tide of non-Jewish scientists turned on him and how he saw the writing on the wall the moment Hitler’s Nazi party grabbed its first large (never majority) share of the electorate.

The Brits lauded him as “Germany’s” greatest scientist. Germany started referring to him as “the Swiss Jew.”

“I am neither a German citizen, nor do I believe in the Jewish faith,” Einstein said at the time. “But I am a Jew and am glad to belong to the Jewish people.”

The moment Hitler seized power, he fled to the U.K., where a British aristocrat, Oliver Locker-Lampson (Andrew Havill), put the great man up in a shack and tent compound on his estate. Conversations, taken from letters and writings in 1933, show how early Einstein was concerned about the energy-release possible by splitting atoms.

Einstein was reluctant to take on activism, fearing reprisals against “the Jewish people” back in Germany. But eventually he came to the conclusion he could not keep silent.

And then he fled to America, to Princeton, where he would be beyond the reach of Nazi assassins, as leader of a “super university” of scientists, a rough outline for the braintrust that would run the Manhattan Project. But the merest hint of “activism” kept him from partaking in the Manhattan Project he, in effect, would inspire with that letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Einstein and the Bomb,” using fresh voice-over narration, recreated headlines and audio clips from decades of historical documentaries for TV — I recognized the late Richard Basehart, and perhaps Lowell Thomas and Alexander Scourby in the archival narrator sound bites — is on solid historical ground throughout. But it’s at its best when capturing the flavor of the fraught times Einstein lived in, especially his later years, when he — not unlike J. Robert Oppenheimer — was encouraged to mull over his role and even the idea of his “guilt” in unleashing the atomic age.

Rating: TV-14, archival footage of Nazi violence

Cast: Aidan McArdle, Andrew Havill and Leo Ashizawa

Credits: Directed by Anthony Philipson, scripted by Anne Mensah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:16