August: A-

Josh Hartnett has a certain look, a certain pose (some would even go so far as to call it a shallow tic). And, in the past, it hasn't served him all too well. In films like The Black Dahlia or Pearl Harbor, when he tends to pull it out, he just sort of…well…stares off. Into nothing. Yet in Austin Chick's August, a canny and poignant snapshot of a corporate wunderkind flaming out, Hartnett's stare does some glorious things: no longer is it a blank mask. This time around his face—eyebrows drawn across like heavy slashes, eyes in premature saddened down-turn—is the audience's window into a soul only slowly and most fully revealed in quick, dodgy glimpses. And, more, it's also the most fascinating tool of a larger character scrutinized to fascinating, microscopic degree.

Arguably, a movie—a story—about what happened in the summer of 2001, right before 9/11, has never quite been told before. Sure, on paper, the outline of events is eerily similar to a host of other films: meteoric economic rise, and then precipitous crash. (Even reading this now, I can see a far larger application for the true mechanism behind this description: a hero's rise and fall.) But the "dot-com" bubble was something different, in its way, something entirely new; and so too was the environment of commerce it sought to create from the old system. The rules had yet to change, but the game had already switched over—changed in mid-stream by a bunch of 20-and-30-something college grads with dreams and the technological skill to (as Hartnett's character Tom Sterling says in a rather beautiful speech half-way through the movie) "write in a language being created right before our eyes." They had business models and financial projections and were pioneers into an area of exploration so vividly exotic as to win the world over. And then: the metaphorical iceberg. A hole, unexpectedly—sinking, then, followed by disaster. In the early summer of 2001, the world of E collapsed, and we enter into the wreckage a month afterward, when Tom—with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott)—is trying to keep their brainchild from going bankrupt three weeks before its stock starts trading publically.

Written by Howard A. Rodman, the first and most notable thing that August does right is create this world piece-by-piece, in seamless fashion. Directed, at first, by Chick like a sort of hazy, drugs-and-women-and-money-and-all breezy biopic about success and easy living, the transition of tone is nearly translucent, making the later implications all the more surprising and powerful. We begin on the outside, looking in on Tom and his circle of corporate cohorts, snorting a little now and then at how much of a jerk he can be. And then we, the audience, is sucked inward, inexorably, unknowingly, bit-by-bit, until the crisis is viewed from the inside-out. His sense of cornered helplessness, of a financial world that has caught him in a cage the size of cigar box, becomes ours.

In that revelation, cleverly, is packed so much more. In showing the psychic strain of being captain of a sinking ship, we see the captain in his naked entirety—the mirror of his perils and follies reflecting back on him with sharp and objective skill. Amidst the morass of shrinking revenue stream, Tom is struggling with hippie-intellectual parents (Rip Torn and Caroline Lagerfelt) who aren't quite sure what their son does…or are proud of it anyway; plus there's the ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) he wants to rekindle things with; and his brother, whose relationship to Tom provides the emotional center of the movie. They're partners, but in a dynamic that is equal about as many times as it is peaceful. Through a perspective efficiently crafted from long-term familial tension, and short-term mega-success, Tom comes to the central revelation of August (in a climactic investors meeting with poignancy that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat and heart simultaneously)—about how, in the end, no bubble burst, no balloon popped. The summer of possibility simply faded into the fall of pragmatism. And a man, played by an actor giving his very best high-wire performance—a cocktail of zest and hurt and charm— was left standing in a strip-club, playing pinball with his brother, slightly wiser now, staring (wistfully now, with a bit of contentment, but still with ambition) at the changing leaves and wondering where the hell all the sunlight went.