One of the first lessons of economics is that money is made up. Put another way, it’s a construct: Money is only worth what we say it’s worth. That means its value is based on trust. And when that trust evaporates — say, when the price of cryptocurrency collapses — things can go south quickly.
That’s the crux of “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” (in theaters), a new documentary directed by Ben McKenzie about the strange universe of cryptocurrency. On first glance, McKenzie is perhaps not the most obvious candidate to direct a movie like this: He is probably best known for playing Ryan Atwood, the protagonist of “The O.C.,” and has worked steadily as an actor on TV and film since the show’s finale in 2007.
But McKenzie became interested in crypto through a friend during the pandemic. It seemed like a lot of people were getting very rich very quickly. His interest quickly turned to skepticism, though, especially when he saw dozens of actors and celebrities, including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Floyd Mayweather and Mike Tyson, hawking crypto in ads and interviews. Surely, McKenzie says with exasperation to his wife (the actress Morena Baccarin), they don’t know what they are talking about. Does … anyone?
“Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” is McKenzie’s attempt to explain cryptocurrency by taking viewers on his own investigative journey, mostly in 2022, and he goes to some peculiar places. He heads to El Salvador, the first country to use Bitcoin as legal tender. He goes to Bitcoin conferences, where he has weird conversations and wonders if this whole thing might be kind of a cult. He goes to Florida to talk with a crypto skeptic he met on the internet who insists on disguising his identity on camera. McKenzie testifies before Congress. He even manages to land an interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX — shortly before FTX’s implosion because of fraud.
McKenzie also uses some narration and animation to fill in basic economic details, which means that even if you’re confused or mystified by the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the movie is a pretty solid introduction to how it works. More important, it explains why people got into it in the first place. There’s often a perception that only tech bros and edgelords and Elon Musk fans would be attracted to that world, but as McKenzie demonstrates, lots of people simply seeking a way to create financial stability for their families were attracted to the promises of the crypto world. He interviews ordinary people who invested money, then lost it.
In one gutting scene, several men talk with him on video about the moment they realized they’d lost their family’s savings and are moved to tears. It’s a reminder that the celebrities who promote the schemes aren’t often hurt — but the ordinary people who believe them are. (Eventually, with the journalist Jacob Silverman, McKenzie wrote his 2023 book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud,” based on these experiences and economic research.)
True to his background in entertainment, McKenzie uses one more trick to remind us that we can’t always believe what we see with our eyes: At the beginning and end of the movie, he nods to two little filmmaking sleights of hand that turn what we’ve seen upside down. It’s one more way to underline his thesis — every monetary system and financial scheme ultimately rests on a story that the participants tell themselves and trust to be true. And the cryptocurrency story, he argues, is powerful because however we feel about it, we agree on its premise: Our current economic is system is broken, and somebody’s got to fix it.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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