Young stars heat up 'Boiler Room,' a cautionary tale for college students

An inside look at the high-stakes world of day-trading, Ben Younger's directorial debut "Boiler Room" depicts a mentality that will seem familiar to Princeton students: the monomaniacal desire to make a million dollars.

"Boiler Room" is at its best introducing protagonist Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi) — a college dropout running a profitable backdoor casino — to the cutthroat, amoral life of the trading floor. The film's first hour should be required viewing for any job-hunting senior with an eye toward Wall Street, where, the film says, brokers make up to 700 phone calls per day.

If this is the place to see "Boiler Room," this may also be the time. The film makes explicit reference to David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross," which closed its run at McCarter Theater last week. In addition to quoting "Glengarry"'s incantatory imperative "always be closing," "Boiler Room" recreates its atmosphere of aggressive and ultimately sterile masculinity.

The floor is a hectic, sweaty place — the boiler room the film's title promises to deliver. It is a world populated almost exclusively by ambitious white males in their early twenties. Young traders are taught, with a vulgar mantra, never to sell to women, and a trader's first sale is celebrated as a loss of virginity, with an emasculating clipping of his necktie thrown in for good measure.

The film's other acknowledged model is "Wall Street," Oliver Stone's 1987 fable about the crooked money game of the 1980s. In one brilliant, audacious scene, the young traders in Younger's film gather around a big screen TV to watch clips of the Stone movie. Gordon Gekko, "Wall Street"'s loathsome antihero, is a man the young brokers clearly envy, and they speak his lines along with him, in a laughing mix of reverence and competitive contempt — apparently the same relationship Younger assumes with respect to Stone himself.

Better still is the setup of the Gekko scene, which has Seth arriving at a senior trader's house, only to discover it unfurnished save for the TV, a leather couch, a tanning bed and a tawdry gold statue. He asks naively if his host has just moved. It turns out that he's been there for months. "They had all the money in the world," Seth muses, "and not a clue what to do with it."

Up through this point the film is a revelation, full of funny one-liners and fresh, vernacular dialogue worthy of an early Tarantino flick. Younger's camera work is also strong. He is equally adept at quick, MTV-style cuts, underlaid with a hip-hop soundtrack, and long, leafy camera sweeps that capture the anesthetizing feel of the suburban Long Island neighborhoods the traders are trying desperately to escape.

Seth's moonlight career as a casino entrepreneur and the censure it earns him from his father (Ron Rifkin) are uncompelling as plot devices, but the casino successfully introduces the movie's leitmotif of risk. "I don't believe in fate," Seth says. "I believe in odds." The theme of risk plays out predictably in the brokerage firm but undergoes a surprising, if underdeveloped twist toward the end, when FBI agents must effectively place bets on Seth's cooperation as they work to bring down some shady operators at the firm.

The firm, it turns out, is a chop-shop, a disreputable brokerage that sells inflated or entirely imaginary stocks to unsuspecting investors, then dumps them when the stocks tumble and runs away with the money. The second half of the film centers on Seth's efforts to investigate his employer, while working out an unnecessary and at times awkward Oedipal subplot with his father.

It is here that the film begins to lose its way. Its electric first hour matched its pace to the unreflective, amoral materialism of its characters. Regrettably, Younger reduces the operative theme to simple immorality, occluding any analysis of the moral repercussions of greed, and he falls back on obvious plot contrivances to give the evil traders their comeuppance.

Through it all, Ribisi manages to maintain some kind of credibility. Best known as the medic from "Saving Private Ryan," he executes Seth's assimilation into the boiler room with subtle precision, and then uses all the flesh on his fleshy face to worry out his withdrawal from it. His hangdog expression and empty, haunting eyes are nevertheless not enough to salvage a few scenes of abominably written dialogue with his father.

As the father, Ron Rifkin, who stands to have a lucrative career as a presidential impersonator in the event of a George W. Bush victory, does serviceable work. Nia Long and Nicky Katt turn in good performances in underwritten roles: Abby, a young black secretary with a bedridden mother, who passes for Seth's love interest; and Greg, an insecure Jew who becomes vaguely evil as the movie develops. Ribisi's "Saving Private Ryan" comrade Vin Diesel, in the role of Seth's benignant mentor, Chris, proves once again to be big, likable and Italian.

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Ben Affleck, the movie's only marketable star, continues to court overexposure with a perfunctory cameo. As Jim Young, a cocky senior partner/drill sergeant, Affleck simply rips off his own performance in the corporate boardroom scene in "Dogma." He does take the movie's best shot at reimagining Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" adage: "Anyone who tells you money is the root of all evil," he assures a roomful of hopeful traders, "doesn't have any."

That Affleck's character will likely be the film's best remembered is not so much a testament to his own star wattage as to the film's ambition. On one level, Seth is too conflicted to become iconic. Younger ultimately sought not to write Seth Davis' story but to rewrite Gordon Gekko's. In that high-stakes game of defining a generational ethos, "Boiler Room" offers a modest but genuine return.