A dreamer and natural showman, armed with ambition, charm and ambivalence to the law, this character played by Leonardo DiCaprio finds himself in the thick of a boom time in America, where anything goes and greed is most definitely good. He climbs the corporate ladder using every shortcut possible — cheating, lying, graft — and indulging in excess until it's almost comical, a parody of desperation to join the old and established moneyed classes.
Consider The Wolf of Wall Street the brash spiritual descendant of The Great Gatsby, stripped of the romance and lyricism of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, the sort of real-life story of a guy who, had it been around at the time, would have embraced everything about Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation without understanding the warnings that drench the novel in disdain for its times.
Luckily for us, that makes The Wolf of Wall Street pretty hilarious, at least from this first look.
Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, the one-time golden boy of Wall Street who made hundreds of millions in the 90's through boiler room trades and cheats, only to fall under the weight of his own lies. Jonah Hill plays his incredibly coifed partner Danny Porush, while Matthew McConaughey sports an even better mane as the delightfully flippant businessman Mark Hanna.
The first trailer was released late Sunday night (see above). Below, some of the trailer's best moments:
A shot right out of Gatsby, save for the gleaming glass skyscraper in the background
Open wide! (Yep, that's a goldfish)
We can all learn from his downfall; Justin Bieber should also tune in for the monkey-tending lessons
Let's allow this to speak for itself
He lost an insane amount of weight for Dallas Buyers Club, but this may be even more striking
