Boiler Room Boilerplate.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

Does it matter that Hollywood always vilifies businessmen?

Boiler Room, the recent and highly entertaining film about rogue stockbrokers who foist junk investments on unwitting and malleable investors, strives mightily to be more than a mere diversion. It aspires to social commentary, to make us face uncomfortable truths about our oh-so-depraved world. "I wanted this movie to be an expose," the film's 27-year-old writer-director Ben Younger told the Chicago Tribune. "Here's what's going on, people, wake up!" The movie's protagonist, a novice seduced by the affluence and power that accrues to his successful colleagues, calls selling stocks "the white-boy way of slinging crack rock." Another character, a brokerage-house recruiter played by Ben Affleck, smugly proclaims, "Anyone who tells you that money is the root of evil doesn't fucking have any."

Much of the press surrounding Boiler Room stresses the film's verisimilitude, its willingness to represent the sleazy details of, as a New York Times critic put it, "the hard-sell ethos of buying and selling, lying and cheating." Many of the movie's reviews note that Younger himself was once recruited by a "boiler room" stock-selling operation and that he spent a long time interviewing brokers at those disreputable firms that hawk shares in unlisted or phony companies (such outfits are estimated to make up about 1 percent of all brokerage firms).

Commenting on the feedback he's gotten since the movie's release, Younger told The New York Post, "I thought I was just depicting [shady brokerage houses], not all of Wall Street. But now I know that there's 50,000 people out there who think this movie is all about them, and the reason is all these firms are completely the same. The March issue of Details, the trendy men's magazine, features an article titled "Inside the Boiler Room" that asks the question, "Is Hollywood's shocking new Wall Street expose on the mark?" The answer: "We got some inside information that says, 'Be afraid.'"

But Boiler Room raises other questions, as well, ones that are more difficult to answer in any sort of pat or moralistic way Does it matter that most depictions of capitalism and business in popular culture are relentlessly negative? Should we be concerned that, as the Times review quoted above suggests, "buying and selling" and "lying and cheating" are often seen as kissing cousins, if not actually married?

Ironically, the pretext for such a discussion is the enormous...