DiCaprio takes ferocious turn as the mad wolf

Martin Scorsese makes money when studios pay him to make movies, and when people buy tickets to see those movies. Maybe that's an oversimplification — certainly that model doesn't take into account the points on the back end, the licensing deals, the royalty packages, and all the other finer details — but it's an accurate overview of how one man makes his fortunes. Other money-making ventures are not so clear.

I've seen countless movies about Wall Street moneymakers, from Gordon Gecko and Wall Street to Boiler Room right on down to the documentaries on Enron and that one where Michael Moore asks investment bankers what derivatives are and they all stutter incomprehensibly. I've also read a variety of articles, including Matt Taibbi's great Rolling Stone piece, the one where he calls Goldman Sachs the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." All of this and I still don't understand how a banker, broker or trader makes money. With Scorsese the process it's transparent, but for white-collar types it's beyond fathomable. They begin the day with $20 and end the day $40, but the money materializes in their bank accounts as if by black magic. Money doesn't grow on trees? Tell that to these guys, who seemingly procure money from the ether by divine intervention.

Martin Scorsese's relentlessly ferocious Wolf of Wall Street plays on our stupidity about the financial world — more accurately, it tap dances on our pulpy scalped skulls gleefully laughing at our thin wallets and three- and four-digit bank balances. At one point, Jordan Belfort, Wolf's crass anti-hero, turns to the camera and begins to explain how he makes money, until he gives up because, well, who cares — "money is money." In the land of bulls and bears, this wolf has nothing but prey.

Belfort, the film's merry cocaine-fueled court jester, is a rookie trader at a New York stock firm. His first day he's baptized by fire: he's taken to lunch by his boss who tells him to do coke at work, masturbate twice a day (once at lunch) and bang hookers by the dozen. But then the firm goes under on Black Monday 1987, leaving the ambitious Belfort to his own devices outside of NYC. Belfort is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is still channeling Jay Gatsby in this similar, but exponentially wackier, role about opulence and money. Some are screaming that the film glorifies the race for wealth, especially as Belfort tosses little people, lets strippers and hookers parade through his office, ingests copious amounts of drugs on (and inside) these hookers, and as he generally acts like a misogynist douchebag as he cheats, lies and manipulates the financial markets. Nevermind that the movie is clearly a satire of banking excess, or that Belfort is the most miserable person Scorsese has ever turned his camera on — remember, for contrast purposes, Marty once photographed a mobster joyfully crushing a man's skull in a carpenter's vice.

Jordan finds work at a strip-mall firm where dead-end salesmen go to die. They also sell penny stocks to Hustler subscribers and deadbeats. (Spike Jonze has a hilarious cameo as the firm manager.) Penny stocks have a 50 percent commission, which can be lucrative on huge orders. Belfort, in his fancy suit and slicked hair, makes his first sale while the rest of the office is dumbstruck at his elegant pitch. He picked up the phone as a rejected Wall Street has-been, but hung it up as a god. Soon he opens his own firm and begins doubling down on the penny garbage while also mixing it up with some blue-chip stocks. His formula is improbably profitable and somehow illegal, although it is never made clear why. As his firm grows and grows — and as the money flows from a trickle to a steady Niagara-like deluge — Jordan slowly unravels into oblivion as money and success dominate his every move.

That is the setup, but the film is so much more. First of all, it's a Scorsese picture, so it plays with all types of narrative devices: freeze frames, narration, flashbacks, breaking-the-fourth-wall speeches, montages … Marty has no limits to how and where this film will go. At any moment it could go careening off into a tangent, as it does several times, first when Jordan learns his partner is married to his first cousin (a scene that ends with Jordan smoking crack cocaine) and eventually into a mesmerizingly nutty sequence of Jordan, rendered to a "cerebral palsy level of high," crawling down a set of stairs to get into his Lamborghini. DiCaprio handles all the super-duper highs and the occasional lows like a champ in what can only be described as a virtuosic performance. Here is an actor in full command of his talents and abilities.

He's joined by a strong cast of co-stars, including Jonah Hill with some kind of denture prosthetic on his teeth. Hill plays his right-hand man, a free-wheelin' frat boy with a key to the executive washroom. P.J. Byrne plays Rugrat, a man with an inconceivably lush hairpiece. There are others, all playing Jordan's Yes Men, all of them coked out of their minds 23 hours of the day. Rob Reiner, the lovable Meathead, plays Jordan's father and the firm's security expert. He's often the voice of reason, albeit an ignored voice. His reaction to a scene about pubic hair trends — "The girls are bald from the eyebrows down" — is priceless. Jordan's wife Naomi, an explosive bombshell, is played with supreme confidence by newcomer Margot Robbie. She's so stunning that one character has this memorable line: "I'd let that girl give me AIDS." As gorgeous as Naomi is, though, she is not what Jordan really wants. He craves the hunt, not the prize; the war, not the spoils.

The movie represents a sexual milestone for the MPAA and it's R rating. I've never seen a movie (of even an NC-17 picture) with so many graphic depictions of sex: bare-breasted women, thrusting, straight sex, gay sex, threesomes, group sex, orgies, sex on airplanes, sex at work, sex in a speeding Ferrari, masturbation in public … the movie doesn't seem to have many limits. In addition to all that, it has what must be a world-record number of exposed vaginas for an R-rated film. We're talking a dozen, maybe more. Now, I'm no prude, but it does make me doubt the veracity of the MPAA and their goofy ratings systems. Also, the drug use: not only is it everywhere, but at one point Belfort looks directly at the audience to pitch cocaine. It's the most explicit endorsement of drugs a movie has ever made, even if the end results are disastrous.

All that being said, though, Wolf of Wall Street is electric filmmaking of the highest order. Yes, at nearly three hours, it's a smidge too long, but it is a kinetic film, always moving, racing even, as it whiplashes from one Jordan sexcapade to another. What really sells me, though, is how it scathingly represents our current era of white-collar crime, with Jordan and his swindling minions as stand-ins for any number of people at Bank of American, JP Morgan Chase or the vampire squid itself, Goldman Sachs. Margin Call, with its hushed boardroom meetings, took a more realistic approach corporate greed, and certainly Oliver Stone's Wall Street shares this movie's manic pace, but mostly Wolf of Wall Street is its own monster, unequal to anything that we've seen, other than Scorsese's Goodfellas or Casino, themselves inside looks into criminal empires. It's provocative and edgy, incriminating and subversive, and it's a cultural indictment of the men and women (but mostly the men) who are squeezing America dry on their derivatives, loan swaps, securities exchanges, sub-prime mortgage bullshit.

It's a messy takedown, but one helluva thrill ride.