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In The Big Short, Adam McKay’s adaptation of the Michael Lewis nonfiction book, a motley group of highly-strung fund managers and financial analysts realize in 2005 that the housing market, the very foundation of the American financial system, is headed for a meltdown. For starters, no one thinks to ask why subprime mortgages are called subprime. So these perceptive assholes start to bet against the housing market by buying credit default swaps.

McKay knows that if we hear the terms “credit default swap” and “collateralized debt obligation”, our minds will leave our bodies and start hovering around the snack bar. Which is one of the reasons the market went bust: regular people don’t want to wrap their brains around these concepts. The joke is that the experts themselves didn’t understand them, either. They just headed off any questions with the words, “It’s too complicated.” Even as it became clear that the financial system was headed for Armaggedon, they refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong. It wasn’t just oversight, it was system-wide fraud.

Screenwriters McKay and Charles Randolph solve the jargon problem by having the narrator, trader Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling with a bad perm and a reptilian aspect), address the audience directly, and bringing in physical representations and celebrity explainers. The subprime mortgage marget is explained with building blocks, or if that’s not visually arresting enough, Margot Robbie from Wolf of Wall Street in a bubble bath. Anthony Bourdain compares collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to three-day-old fish remarketed as fish stew. Our personal favorite: synthetic CDOs are dogshit wrapped in catshit. It’s an educational movie, a hilarious comedy, and a financial thriller that is thrilling even if we know how it ends.

The terrific cast is headed by Christian Bale as Michael Burry, a socially-awkward investment analyst with a glass eye who has heavy metal blasting in his office. This makes sense because compared to the mortgage market, heavy metal is harmonious. He starts betting that doomsday is nigh. Vennett gets wind of his transactions, and a wrong number leads him to a hedge fund headed by a very angry man named Mark Baum (Steve Carell). Baum is wrestling with personal tragedy, but even if he wasn’t, he’s the sort of person who is most happy being unhappy.

Meanwhile, two young traders named Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) accidentally learn of the scheme and enlist the help of retired financial wizard Ben Rickert (Hot damn Brad Pitt looks good with facial hair. Pitt, one of the producers, starred in the adaptation of another Michael Lewis book, Moneyball). They come up with another way to profit off the impending catastrophe.

McKay, who directed the Anchorman movies and co-founded the Funny Or Die website, has us rooting for these guys against the housing market. We join them in seething against the clueless morons who laugh at them. We rail against the blind fools who refuse to see the evidence in their faces (Melissa Leo’s literally blind S&P officer explains that if they downgrade the outlook, the banks will just go to their competitor).

And then, when it is obvious to everyone that our guys were right, we can’t really celebrate. They’ve won, but the losers—the people responsible for breaking the economy—will never be brought to justice. The US government bails them out with the people’s money, and they take the bailout and give themselves performance bonuses. For screwing up. They’ve won but the ordinary people pay, losing their houses, their life savings, their pensions. They’ve won, but they’re profiteers who cannot claim moral superiority to the financial powers they bet against. In this equation, everyone is an asshole.

P.S. CDOs are back, rebranded as “Bespoke Tranche Opportunities”. Shiftyyyyyyy.

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Check out some other films on the 2008 financial meltdown: the Oscar-winning documentary The Inside Job, J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, and Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes.