A very well made movie of a terrible group of stock traders.

Rating: Null/10 (4 May 2014)

There are many noteworthy days in the history of Wall Street and the stock market, and the one featured here is "Black Monday", October 19, 1987, when the market dropped about 1/3rd. Jordan Belfort was a young man of about 25, had just started a new job on Wall Street, and this event put him out of work. It turned out to be the catalyst for the subject of this movie.
Belfort found a job as a trader with a motley band of guys who focused on so-called "penny stocks", very small mostly unknown companies selling for generally less than one dollar per share, often for only a few cents. He was puzzled, why worry about these. Because, he learned, the commission was great, 50% of the sales total and getting a few investors to buy $5000 to $10,000 worth would generate a very handsome income. Plus the operation of such trading was scarcely regulated, if at all in the 1980s.
So filled with the euphoria of big profits Belfort rented a garage and started his own trading company with his own motley crew and trained them well. But what they did was illegal, where a large number of traders each buy parcels of a penny stock to drive up the price, then dumping them. They get the profits from both hefty commission and artificially inflated stock prices, while the investors get taken.
This and other irregularities resulted in Belfort being convicted and sent to prison, but his term was shortened by his cooperation with the FBI. So this movie is about those 6 or 7 years where he was expanding his trading operation making himself and his traders wealthy by playing very loose with the rules. And living immersed deeply in the drug and sex culture. It mostly comes across as a dark comedy.
Belfort himself says the drugs and sex shown in the movie, including sex parties at work or on the yacht, and the pervasive foul language, are not exaggerated at all. Maybe so, but to me it was way overdone for what turns out to be a mainstream movie with an A-list director. I am all for accuracy but it would have been a much better movie if they had moderated the filth quite a bit. That part disappointed me, that Hollywood continues to get so raw and less entertaining.
Leonardo DiCaprio is really good as Jordan Belfort, arguably his best performance so far, and to me he deserved the Oscar for best actor. Also superb is Jonah Hill as his foul buddy, Donnie Azoff. Margot Robbie is lovely as his second wife, Naomi. And also superb is the actual Oscar winner, in another movie, Matthew McConaughey as Mark Hanna, Belfort's early boss who explains to him what the trading business is really all about, they don't care about the clients, and whether they make money on investments. The traders get commission, their job is to keep the buying and selling going.
Although this is based on a real person and his own story, many of the characters and events are fictional.