Philosophical Ross Ulbricht creates Silk Road in his twenties , a dark net website that sells narcotics, while DEA agent Rick Bowden goes undercover to bring him down.

The novelty of bitcoin and the dark web facilitated a new drug market and allowed smart internet-savvy citizens the chance to procure hard-to-find drugs. Telling such story about its inventor proved to be a challenge, one of which is the moral issue. This movie is more tan that. Jason Clarke brings his A-game while Nick Robinson fills in the gaps as cop and criminal, respectively. While the movie certainly looks like it’s made on a shoestring budget, the two leads propel much of its force making it at least entertaining if not educational.

Ross Ulbricht (Robinson), a directionless libertarian has an idea: what if you could buy and sell drugs over the internet just as easily as an Amazon purchase? Confound the War on Drugs by taking it all online where the government’s burgeoning cyber crimes division was woefully unprepared. One the other sides Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), a DEA agent was sent to finish his career behind a desk after life undercover in the narcotics world. Bowden can barely type on a keyboard and his technical ineptitude makes him a liability for the cyber crimes division, but his street work brought him an advantage to solve Silk Road case. As the website grows in popularity the danger grows as well, both men cut away their families and friends when their obsession over the dark web drug trade grows. Both make awful decisions and both circle each other, cop and criminal, looking for a way out.

The film goes on at a decent clip, driving the story with few resting points. From the outside looking in, the movie feels like a cheap rush of crime thriller for the twenty-first century. The murder-for-hire and police interrogations feel particularly low stakes in the grand scheme of things and a simple moral decay on both ends carries only so much gravitas. I liked it, but this movie had no right to be as good as I found it to be.