My most striking reaction while watching the crisply-packaged incredible true story of that time when an army of Reddit-affiliated retail traders rallied to cause seemingly worthless GameStop stock price to rocket to the moon was that all of this happened just a little over a year ago. I suppose that time flows differently in a pandemic. The burst of trading pitting little internet “apes” against over-leveraged hedge funds captivated the media somewhere between the insurrection on the Capitol and the rollout of the first vaccines, before hot vax summer and the revenge of the omicron. So, something like a million years ago, yet a remarkably quick turnaround to get some of the key players on film and telling their stories of how amateur stock trading during a shutdown transformed their lives.

A great way to feel ancient is to watch a very thorough documentary about someone who is incredibly famous whose existence you were nevertheless unaware. In this case, it was Casey Neistat’s account of the the rise and fall and rise of an incredibly popular YouTube personality called David Dobrik. Having himself achieved a high degree of notoriety through his own marathon presence on the social networking service, Neistat’s familiarity with the platform, fame, and Dobrik himself ideally positioned Neistat to get an insider’s view of a young star’s stratospheric ascent. When he began filming interviews with him in 2018, neither had any idea what was yet to come.

“The following actually happened. My dad asked me to tell you it didn’t.” These are the first words that we see as James Morosini opens his autobiographical film. It’s one that he writes, directs, and has cast himself in the lead role, and as the story unfurls in ever-excruciating waves of cringe-inducing parental behavior, audiences will likely cling to this disclaimer in escalating disbelief about the veracity of these claims. As I squirmed through the hour and a half, I frequently found myself wondering about the therapeutic value of a thirty-year-old portraying himself at age seventeen to relive a terrible chapter in his own life. For his sake, I also hoped that the opening lines were themselves untrue.