"Startup.com"

Part of what makes the film so fascinating is the way it both reinforces and contradicts everything we think we know about Internet start-ups. The co-founders have cellphones glued to their heads; they multitask 24-7. They work out of cardboard boxes in unfinished offices; they chant together in a morning meeting and run away on company retreats. They talk about "lousy valuations" and use a funny language with words like "heuristic" and "holistic." The media adores them.

At the same time, the business consumes their lives. They have to buy out a friend and co-founder of the company. They destroy their personal relationships. They fend off tremendous pressure from investors, from their board, from their friends. And in the end, they turn on each other and drag lawyers into the middle of a friendship. They're kids -- both in their late 20s -- trying to simultaneously harness the money and power of traditional business and subvert the old way of doing things. (To cite one example, the cast is one of the most pan-ethnic that I've ever seen in any film, documentary or feature.) And they all expect to get rich.

We don't see much of the application they're working on, or really how it gets made. And that's a fault of the film, but one that works to its advantage. You can read it as a minor misstep or a winking joke on the company and the Internet boom itself. We know all this money is flying around, and all this work is being done, but we only have a vague idea of what it's all about.

Shot on mini DV, usually with one or two cameras, the images in "Startup.com" are often dark or grainy. But the camera seems to be everywhere. In one shot, a shirtless Kaleil talks on the phone from the edge of his bed with his girlfriend's arms wrapped around him. It's an incredibly intimate moment, one where you can see him erasing any line between the business and his personal life. Or in another scene, Kaleil calls his mother at 1 in the morning just to chat. "I'm in the zone, Mom," he says unconvincingly.

With scenes like that, the film manages to do what the best documentaries do: It takes you into someone else's life. (Noujaim lived with Kaleil and began filming him around their apartment when he started the company; Hegedus joined later.) The people on the other side of the camera forget that they're being watched, or they become bored with the cameras, and they reveal themselves. It's particularly obvious in "Startup.com." At the start of the film, Kaleil almost mugs for the camera. He's seen movies and read business stories and he knows he's the star. But as time goes on, you can feel Hegedus and Noujaim slipping into the background, unnoticed. Later, we watch Kaleil duck into an empty room and say a prayer.

Hegedus and Noujaim know their subjects are fascinating, particularly Kaleil, but it's not so easy to figure out what we're supposed to feel about them. We're initially charmed by Kaleil, like everyone else, but we see him turning into sort of a businessman drone. We watch him destroy a relationship with one girlfriend and see another go sour before it really starts. We admire his leadership, but then we see him screwing over his friends.

Kaleil knows he and his company are in trouble. The competitor's site is better, and GovWorks has flat revenues, bloated infrastructure and no clear path to cash. He's being crushed from all sides. Tom says that he'd rather see the company go down than risk personal relationships. Kaleil says that the investors and the board "don't care if we grow and learn."

We empathize with Kaleil but, because we've witnessed him make so many choices, we don't afford him any cheap sympathy. We don't want to see him fail; it's painful to watch. But we realize that if these guys are losing something they created, they're losing a business. No one is crushing their sculptures or burning their paintings. And we remember just who these people are: smart, talented, ambitious young people who had the guts to start something grand. They'll be OK, and they know it, too.

"How bad can it be?" asks Tom. "We'll get other jobs, start other businesses."

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