About a third of the way into ''Boiler Room,'' Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a young stockbroker-in-training at a fly-by-night company called J. T. Marlin, drops by a co-worker's house for an evening of pizza and beer.
The house, a huge, expensive stucco affair somewhere on Long Island, is completely unfurnished except for a tanning machine, a leather couch and a big-screen television set, around which the power players of hard-sell stock trading, all men in their early to mid-20's, are gathered. They are watching a tape of ''Wall Street,'' and it's clearly a movie they've seen many times before, since they all seem to have the whole script committed to memory.
''Boiler Room,'' written and directed by the 29-year-old Ben Younger, is both an homage to Oliver Stone's 1987 fable of innocence corrupted by avarice and a critique of it. The baby sharks of J. T. Marlin like to play Gordon Gekko karaoke, bloviating along with Michael Douglas's mephistophelean arbitrageur and mocking his windy grandiosity. Compared to them, though, the reptilian Gekko is a great intellectual and a devoted humanitarian. His mantra, ''greed is good,'' strikes a sententious, faintly absurd note in the amoral world of ''Boiler Room,'' in which greed is simply axiomatic. When Gekko thundered ''I own!'' he meant he controlled large and consequential pieces of the world: companies, factories, the lives of thousands of workers. But Jim Young (Ben Affleck) -- Marlin's designated drill sergeant and, at 27, one of its wise old heads -- prefers to boast about his Ferrari, his mansion and his toys.
Like Gekko, Jim and his confreres, who rake in millions peddling dicey stocks over the phone to suckers in the hinterlands, represent the seductive power of unadulterated capitalism. Not that anyone needs much seducing these days. Seth's voice-over at the start of the film conjures instant Microsoft millionaires and lottery winners, and he cites Notorious B.I.G., the avatar of hip-hop in its high-living, money-loving ''playa'' mode, on the allure of easy money. Seth, a college dropout who runs an illegal 24-hour casino in his Queens apartment, knows all the specs on the new Ferrari, even though he's still driving his mother's Volvo wagon.
Like ''Wall Street,'' ''Boiler Room'' tells the story of an ambitious young man's rise, fall and redemption. And like Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox, Seth carries some heavy Oedipal baggage -- a troubled relationship with his demanding, disapproving father (Ron Rifkin) -- onto the trading floor. But at its best, which is awfully good, ''Boiler Room'' avoids the thumping moralism that has made Oliver Stone the least misunderstood director in Hollywood. It's less about selling your soul than about feeling your oats.
In its close attention to the hard-sell ethos of buying and selling, lying and cheating, ''Boiler Room'' calls to mind another movie its characters occasionally quote, James Foley's 1992 adaptation of David Mamet's play ''Glengarry Glen Ross.'' (At times it hews a bit too close for comfort. Mr. Affleck's role -- to say nothing of his suit, his hair and his handsome hint of jowliness -- seems to have been traced over the outline of Alec Baldwin in that earlier movie.) Mr. Younger is, like Mr. Mamet, a passionate anthropologist, and he possesses an ear for the idioms and speech patterns of his chosen subculture that Mr. Mamet might envy.
J. T. Marlin, despite the phony blue-blood name, is miles from Wall Street, somewhere off Exit 53 of the Long Island Expressway, to be precise. It is populated not by well-connected M.B.A.'s but by outer-borough strivers, sons of the white ethnic middle class weaned on movies -- ''Goodfellas'' as much as ''Wall Street'' -- and on rap music. ''Boiler Room'' registers how completely the styles and attitudes of several generations of hip-hop stars, from Slick Rick to Puff Daddy, have permeated white youth culture. Mr. Younger's filmmaking style, with its fast, fluid cutting and its layered, improvisatory rhythm, is the perfect visual correlative to the movie's soundtrack, which boasts a canny mix of old and new school flavors.
For Seth, selling stocks is ''the white-boy way of slinging crack rock,'' and he and his crew clearly believe that trading bogus shares in iffy companies gives them the sexual potency and outlaw chic of the pimps and drug dealers who are their favorite archetypes of rap mythology. ''These guys were mackin' it hard,'' Seth marvels when he first sees the rows of expensive cars in the Marlin parking lot.
He might be talking about the cast of ''Boiler Room.'' Mr. Ribisi uses everything he has -- his creaky voice, his oddly shaped face, his pallid skin -- to deliver a perfectly balanced, beautifully nuanced performance. He captures Seth's man-child suavity as well as his childish sensitivity, and the sweetness underneath his cynicism.
Nearly every other performance in the movie is as good as Mr. Ribisi's. Nicky Katt, who played a scarily articulate hit man in ''The Limey,'' is almost unrecognizable here as Greg, a moody, sarcastic broker who fancies himself Seth's mentor. His performance is complemented by the work of Vin Diesel, who may be the sexiest ugly man in movies since Anthony Quinn, and by Scott Caan (son of James), who plays Sonny Corleone with a broker's license. Nia Long brings wit and patience to the underwritten role of Marlin's receptionist and Seth's love interest, a black woman surrounded by white guys trying to act like homeboys.
''Boiler Room'' reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture. Mr. Younger presents a world ruled by a gang of lawless, soulless children, like the island of lost boys in ''Peter Pan.'' But his film also shows us a group of actors, and a filmmaker, with soul to spare and talent to burn.
''Boiler Room'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes a steady stream of obscenities and shocking displays of naked greed.
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