Yes, with one qualification that changes how you should read almost every scene. The film is adapted from a memoir written by the man at the center of the events, after he had been convicted and had served his sentence. That is a real source, but it is a self interested one. The court record is a separate body of material, and where the two disagree, the court record is the one that was tested.
The film and its source book
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Based on a true story? | Yes, adapted from a first person memoir |
| Based on a book? | Yes, The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort, 2007 |
| Written by | Terence Winter |
| Directed by | Martin Scorsese |
| Lead cast | Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler |
| First shown | December 2013 |
A memoir is a source, not a record
Every adaptation inherits the limits of the thing it adapts, and this one inherits a book written by a convicted fraudster about his own life. That does not make the book worthless. It does mean that its selection of events, its comic tone and its distribution of blame were all choices made by someone with reasons to make them.
Belfort himself has said the film captures the general feeling of the period and has volunteered that his drug use was in fact worse than what is shown, while objecting to how simply the film presents the point at which the firm crossed into criminality. Both of those comments come from the same source as the book. Taken together they tell you the author is not aiming at a neutral account, and neither is the film.
What the court record establishes
Here is the part that does not depend on anyone’s memory. Stratton Oakmont was a real brokerage that operated as a boiler room, pushing penny stocks and running pump and dump schemes. It employed over a thousand brokers and was involved in stock issues worth more than a billion dollars, including the initial public offering of Steve Madden. The National Association of Securities Dealers expelled the firm in December 1996.
Belfort pleaded guilty in 1999 to charges connected with securities fraud and money laundering. He cooperated with the FBI, wore a wire against associates and testified against them. In 2003 he was sentenced to four years and served twenty two months. He was ordered to pay 110.4 million dollars in restitution to 1,513 defrauded clients. Those figures come from the proceedings, not from a manuscript, and they are the backbone of the story.
Donnie Azoff is not Danny Porush
The character played by Jonah Hill corresponds in outline to Danny Porush, who really was Belfort’s partner at Stratton Oakmont. The name was changed, and it was changed because Porush threatened legal action. He has since maintained that much of the film is fictional and that the character is not an accurate portrait of him, including some of its most quoted moments.
This is the clearest illustration of the problem with the film as history. The disputed material passes through two filters, first the memoir and then the screenplay, and the person on the other side of it has publicly denied the version that reached the screen. Nothing about that has been adjudicated. It simply sits there as two accounts that do not match.
The people the film leaves offscreen
The restitution order names more than fifteen hundred defrauded clients, and the film is not interested in any of them. That absence has been raised repeatedly, including by a former prosecutor on the case, who argued that the film gives almost no space to the people who lost money and that some of what Belfort has claimed was invented. The daughter of a Stratton Oakmont employee made a similar objection in public at the time of release.
You can accept that a film is entitled to its point of view and still register what that point of view costs. A story told from inside the boiler room, adapted from a book written by the man who ran it, will naturally treat the fraud as an appetite rather than as a transfer of money from named people to him.
How to weigh a first person source
The practical approach with any film adapted from a participant’s own book is to sort claims into three piles. Structural facts, such as the firm, the charges, the sentence and the restitution, are documented and reliable. Disputed incidents, especially the ones involving other named people, should be treated as one side of an argument. Interior material, including motives, private conversations and what the narrator says he was thinking, exists only because he says so.
By that measure the film is true in its structure, contested in its anecdotes, and unverifiable in its interior. That is a more accurate answer than yes or no, and it is the one the question is really asking for.
