Watch the bubble grow. Watch the bubble burst.
by Jurgen Fauth

Jehane Nouhjaim's dot-com-entary is nothing if it isn't timely: the ink from yesterday's headlines isn't dry yet, some of us are still wondering what happened to our stock options and our jobs, and already there's a cinema verite film about it all in the theaters, produced by documentary veteran DA Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, The War Room).

But when it comes to movies, timeliness isn't what matters: a documentary is only as good as its subject, and Jehane Nouhjaim's roommate Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, who left Goldman Sachs and teamed up with his high school buddy Tom Herman to start a company, is not a very interesting man. You don't need to be a former subscriber to Wired Magazine to already know the plot of Startup.com: snotnosed boys have dot-com idea, boys get VC funding, hire lots of employees, enjoy photo-ops with President Clinton, and lose it all when the e-business market comes crashing down. If this last sentence didn't seem like news to you, just imagine it stretched out to 103 minutes.

This is not to say that parts of Startup.com aren't interesting, fascinating even. The corporate double-speak and the ease at which millions are thrown around should be enough to make most of us pale. Kaleil and Tom, while eating pizza and brooding over laptops haphazardly propped up on chairs, come up with a business ideas and a (domain-) name to register: they'll make the paying of parking tickets easier, and the whole enterprise will be called "govWorks.com." I'd put a link to their site into this article -– but alas, it doesn't exist anymore.

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Shot in the hand-held style Pennebaker pioneered in his groundbreaking Dylan documentary almost thirty years ago, the film follows Kaleil and Tom from their growing office space on Broadway to the offices of venture capitalists and their family farms. They cheerlead their new employees ("Refuse to lose!"), they pump iron at the gym, they buy out troublesome co-founders, they discuss "leadership issues," and they keep hugging each other. In the last half hour, as the plot thickens and the funding dries up, the hugs stop because somebody has to lose their job for the business to succeed. Ach, the drama!

The heady times of the last few years are certainly fertile ground for any number of novels, movies, and Broadway musicals. But the most fascinating thing about Startup.com isn't that two good friends could end up betraying one another over a business, or that anybody could have been foolish enough to give two amateurs with a half-baked idea millions and millions of dollars. The biggest shock in Startup.com is the shallowness of its protagonists. Kaleil and Tom aren't just boys, as Kaleil's spurned girlfriend tells the camera. As portrayed in the film, the hopeful conquerors of vertical markets lack any kind of depth, and their downfall has as much emotional impact as Wile E. Coyote blowing himself up in a Roadrunner cartoon. They tap at their laptops, gab into their cell phones, drive their SUVs and thumb their Palm Pilots like wasteful five-year-olds on the day after Christmas.

Watching them burn through their millions as if they were monopoly money, it occurred to me that maybe if their exploits weren't so virtual, these guys wouldn't be half as inexperienced and childish. This problem becomes one for the filmmakers too when the company launches and there isn't anything to show. Here is the most triumphant moment of Tom and Kaleil's career, and all that really happened is that a server in some basement went online and became publicly accessible. It doesn't exactly make for thrilling visuals, and apparently it's not conducive to emotional growth either.

No doubt: the roller-coaster ride of this gilded age provides all kinds of interesting plots and intense human drama that can be explored in film. But if all the real-life protagonists of the dot-com boom and subsequent dot-bomb fall-out are as shallow and predictable as Tom and Kaleil, then we'd all be better off if truthful accounts stayed out of movie theaters and remained on the business pages until somebody comes along who can spin all that silicone into narrative gold.

Directed by Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus. R, 105 minutes. Startup.com opens today at the Film Forum in New York. An Artisan Entertainment release.