Startup.com

In a significant moment in this film from Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, up-and-coming entrepreneur Kaleil Isaza Tuzman hands soon-to-be ex-president Bill Clinton his business card -- just in case in case Bill's looking for a job when he moves to New York. It's a fitting nod to Hegedus's previous film, The War Room, which he directed with documentary legend D.A. Pennebaker (he produces here), a chronicle of the 1992 presidential campaign that won Clinton the White House. It's also a reminder of how much documentary subjects have diminished over the intervening years.

Here the same fly-on-the-wall, cinéma-vérité technique pioneered by Pennebaker four decades ago follows not the sordid workings of democracy but the greedy pipe dreams of an evanescent economy. Tuzman and govWorks.com co-founder Tom Herman did have a good idea -- a Web site where citizens can conduct such government business as paying parking tickets or applying for licenses without the requisite red tape and long waiting lines. The pair's enthusiasm and energy impresses, too, as they scramble for funding and build a company that doubles in size each quarter. But the pressure affects their personal lives (will Tuzman commit to a girlfriend? will Herman keep his beard?) and finally their friendship, causing the inevitable internecine backstabbing and disillusionment that make the big crash (I don't think I'm giving away anything here to anyone who's followed the economy) anticlimactic. They're also lightweight compared to the Carvilles and Stephanopouloses of days gone by. As for the film's epilogue, it suggests that Clinton would have done well to hang onto that business card. At the Avon.
-- Peter Keough