In the history of flippant comments that sound like they could mark the end of civilization, there’s a staggering contender in “The new Americans: the game, a revolution— especially since it comes from an investor who seems reasonably smart. The film, the latest documentary provocation written and directed by Ondi Timoner (“Mapplethorpe,” “We Live in Public”), is about the new era of lone stock traders — many, but not all, millennials — who grew up playing video games and are now experiencing to invest at home as a literal extension of this one-minute thrilling world. The new trading apps, designed as visual candy, are meant to give you the rush players get (and also the high people crave in slots). Trying to sum up the lizard-brain appeal of it all, an investor named Mitchell Hennessey explains, “Even if you lose on the trade, confetti appears and you almost feel like you’re leveling up. Even though you may have lost 50 percent. So you just lost half your money, but it feels as if you were a winner. This is called drinking snake oil.

Over the past five years I have seen and reviewed a number of very good documentaries about the better worlds made possible by digital media – films like “TikTok, Boom.” (about the TikTok revolution and Chinese ownership of the company), “The American Meme» (about the world of influencers), “Under the influence” (about the most scurrilous influencer of all, David Dobrik), “Eliminated” (about what cell phone addiction does to us), and “A Glitch in the Matrix” (an exploration of simulation theory, which holds that nothing around us is real, a theory that Elon Musk has publicly stated he believes). These films did a marvelous job of not only capturing the new culture of disruption, but also coloring a new consciousness.

“The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution”, in its most punky way, feels equally fascinating and essential. It enters into difficult terrain to capture and make accessible for a documentary (the ins and outs of finance), but Timoner, who has become a more graphically energetic filmmaker, has made a kaleidoscopic film that hooks us into the details of stocks of memes, diamond hands (holding a stock no matter what) and cryptocurrency. The stock market has long been driven by fantasies of wealth, but what “The New Americans” recounts is how day trading, by civilians, became the new norm: a high-yield form of wealth management. for people who, for the most part, don’t. to have some. Everything is motivated by the idea that the democratization of the stock market is a way of fighting against power. It’s like everyone in the house is their own Jim Cramer crossed with Neo from “The Matrix.” They are trying to make their way to a fortune.

As the film presents, the generation it focuses on entered the adult world with massive debt (from college), no savings, and a system that they believe is rigged against them. They distrust everything: the government, the media, etc. Everything is corrupt, everything is fake, everything is organized to deceive us and let us down. As a result, everyone wants an instant shortcut to success. Life has become a fantasy of shortcuts: gaining instant omni-visibility on YouTube or TikTok, communicating with memes, and the financial mindset of gamers who grew up trading “assets” in one click.

The possibility looms, of course, of making a murder. Statistically, the odds are low, but that’s what the culture of player investing encourages you to believe. And it’s not like it’s all a coincidence; there are skills and knowledge involved – the split-second timing that hedge funds, built around the immediacy of computer analysis, use to their advantage. This level of speed and information is now, theoretically, accessible to everyone. But that, as the documentary shows, has also merged with a rebellious undercurrent that sees itself as something larger than finance.

It is, as Timoner explores, what led to the GameStop saga, where a wave of investors, united through the WallStreetBets subreddit page, unleashed a short squeeze, sending the stock soaring like a rocket. All of this wreaked havoc on the world of hedge fund investors (who shorted stocks). It happened just weeks after the capital riot on January 6, 2021, and the documentary says it was no coincidence. Both were unruly insurgencies, driven less by logic — GameStop, a brick-and-mortar company with no notable finances, in any way justified the short push — than by exhibitionist symbolism of the rise of the people. In this case: The people! Would raise a stock! For a video game store! And call out their wrath on the elite!

As “The New Americans” reveals, the world of attitude investing is all about mythology. That’s what it feeds, whether or not it inflates your bank account. It’s about stock trading as personal empowerment, as a way to undermine the system, as a way to fight the new American oligarchy. It is no coincidence that one of the key applications of the time is called Robinhood.

Jean-Luc Godard, in his film “Masculin Féminin” from 1966, portrayed “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. “The New Americans” is about the children of the 2008 financial crisis and Roblox, a contradiction that sounds more like a recipe for dystopia. The collapse of 2008 represents the collapse of our hopes and aspirations, of the American dream. Rising player rebellion is one way to reclaim this power. Still, it’s one that can be almost entirely delusional. Ondi Timoner perceives the illusion but also wants to sell its intoxication; and so the film, at times, seems less skeptical than it could have been. Then again, you could say that the film’s ambivalent semi-approval of these rebellious door-to-door traders only adds another layer of onions to the grand delusion they’re caught in.

The film itself steps up, entering the mysterious world of cryptocurrency – and if the metaphysics of bitcoin and NFTs tend to confuse you, you’ll appreciate how gripping this section of the film is. Timoner, once again, invites us to let ourselves be carried away by the illusion, and perhaps she herself is there too. One of its talking heads, Raoul Pal, a former hedge fund insider who became the co-founder of Real Vision, says cryptocurrency is the future. But as we begin to understand the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of currency that exists outside of the system and is sold (in the case of NFTs) on the basis of cool art , the more everything starts to look like a pyramid scheme. When the cryptocurrency market crashes and a trillion dollars worth of wealth is wiped out, the question arises: was it ever really there?

In a way, you could say the whole movie is about video game junkies trying to get rich – and get their adrenaline pumping – out of financial bubbles. I mean, it’s a film in which the real Jordan Belfort, from “The Wolf of Wall Street”, is presented as a paragon of common sense, and in which influencers, like the 20-year-old Instagram star, Taylor Page, are all saying, “Look what I’ve done!” Look what you can do!”

These documentaries often end up being portrayals of scoundrels, and in “The New Americans,” the Worst Cad In The Movie symbol is Joby Weeks, a Bitcoin evangelist who was charged with tax evasion and securities fraud after orchestrating a massive cryptocurrency scheme that is alleged to have defrauded three-quarters of a million people. Unapologetic Weeks made a mint, traveled to 175 countries, met the Pope, drove his dream cars and did whatever he wanted. “I’ve always seen myself as a catalyst for revolution,” he says, and that’s the talk of the new generation, even when they’re old-fashioned greedy. “The New Americans”, in a way, exposes them. But in another way, the film also uses this rhetoric. What he does not mean is that wealth, like matter, cannot be created or destroyed – it can simply be gathered, dispersed or lost. And one of the best ways to bring it back is to convince everyone who’s going to lose it that they’re part of a revolution.