Typical woke nonsense – a biopic of Robert E. Lee starring Kate Winslet as the Civil War general – it’s no wonder it didn’t perform too well in the southern states. No, I’m only joking, it’s actually about Lee Miller, the pioneering WWII photojournalist, and was a real labour of love for Winslet. It’s the first feature directed by the cinematographer Ellen Kuras, and while it took years to make due to funding issues, and sat on the shelf for a long time after its festival debut in 2023 (which are not often good signs), it was met with praise when it finally saw the light of day and has received some awards attention, particularly for Winslet’s performance.

We had to wait a few more months, oddly, for Alexandre Desplat’s score to be released, but here it is – the first striking thing is the immense effort put into the album cover, with the three-letter title thoughtfully shown in a white font over a plain brown background. The graphic designer’s years of training were more than worth it.

Musically, the composer treads what for him is familiar ground, but he does it with skill and panache. We open with the main theme – respectful but not cloyingly so, it has an air of dignity to it but also great warmth – the piano and orchestra combining to give us a very attractive piece, one that will go straight onto people’s Desplat playlists.

Not surprisingly given the story, the body of the score doesn’t always have that warmth. A pair of tracks not long in both demonstrate the composer’s skill at scoring serious drama, in such different ways: “Hospital” keeps that piano and orchestra blend but here the piano is used for a simple repeating figure evoking great tension over suspenseful strings; then in “Liberation” fairly ominous percussion accompanies a descending motif of sadness. It’s very effective (and reminds me, as Desplat so often does in certain ways, of John Barry).

Emotion often comes to the fore – after the tension of that pair of cues comes the elegiac “Solange”, which sees a complex dramatic blend of darkness seemingly giving way to light as a melody emerges amongst a sea of very high-register strings before disappearing again. At other times, Desplat highlights the key emotional moments through variations on the appealing main theme, and they are always welcome; and the counterpoint to that comes from some really very dark moments (the electronics of “To the Front”, the sheer horror of “Arriving at Dachau”).

It will probably be too understated for some, but I think Lee is a very strong piece of work with a carefully-honed dramatic structure to it. Yes, Desplat is firmly within his comfort zone (in many ways this is like a sister effort to The Light Between Oceans) but I’m happy for him to be there – of his contemporaries only Thomas Newman is comparable when it comes to scoring this kind of movie. The moments of light that shine through in the score are all the lighter because of the more challenging material that surrounds them and I think it’s a skilful and cerebral effort from one of the finest film composers around.

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