Tom and Kaleil start off with irrational exuberance, quitting their lucrative day jobs to work 80-hour weeks and gloat excitedly over the huge amounts of money they're recruiting. They have a clever ad campaign, they hold retreats for their staff, they have give-away baseball caps made -- life is good (seeing what eventually happens made me feel a little guilty for all the free stuff I scammed off startups back in the "wild, wild West" days of Internet commerce... but only a little, and not for very long). Kaleil becomes the poster boy for overnight Internet success and even gets to schmooze with President Clinton. The partners' lack of experience in business shows through at meetings with venture capitalists, but it doesn't seem fatal. (One thing we never get to see, though I suspect it would be of no interest to most people outside the Beltway, is how they got municipalities to sign on to their plan.)
More troubling, as the film progresses, is that GovWorks.com is clearly not going to work as it's intended by the day they are scheduled to go live, while a competing site is already up and running. The bubble doesn't exactly burst for them, but it definitely constricts swiftly, prompting a reorganization at the top: Tom offers to leave but wants a definite settlement worked out before he does; in the meantime, Kaleil fires him (and, in the final icy indignity, has Tom escorted out of the building by a sheepish staff member).
You know, of course, how this is going to end (I kept having the urge to impart to Kaleil and Tom the career advice David Spade gave Kriss Kross on a long-ago "Hollywood Minute": "It's a short ride, boys -- save some cash"). By the end of the movie, Kaleil's drastic moves haven't done any good: his company is gone, and all that money is just paper. The only upside is that he and Tom salvage their friendship (a coda tells us they've gone back into business together on a website that helps failed dot-coms).
Kaleil is a magnetic and polarizing guy. He's got the glad-handing intensity of a Dale Carnegie graduate, the oily insincerity of a used-car salesman, and an ego that more than matches his ambitions. I disliked him from the start as a smug phony and was relieved to see by the end that he had enough humanity in him to value his friendship with Tom. Tom, on the other hand, is quiet and more pliable, though he has his limits and pushes back when his friend gives him no other choice.
The intimate camerawork catches you up in the whirlwind of the story -- no way a conventional movie could do that the way a documentary can. This movie will likely be the definitive statement on the Internet bubble, and I say with tongue only slightly in cheek that it's practically a work of such historic and cultural significance that it should be how we teach our kids about those wild, free-for-all days of the early Internet commerce revolution. It's definitely something you should see now.
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