As the lights dimmed on a recent advance screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to Oliver Stone’s iconic 1987 tale of money and power, I thought to myself, Well, let’s see whose ox is gored.

The advance word was that the film was going to be a scathing expose of hedge funds, blaming them for the collapse of the big banks in 2008. The buzz was that it was going to be a bit like Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which exonerated Lee Harvey Oswald, put the blame on a government conspiracy, and elevated the loony Jim Garrison to heroic status. Had that happened, Stone would have pulled a con job on the public. As I've pointed out many times, most recently here, the blame for the near collapse of the financial system lies squarely with the big Wall Street banks and the snoring watchdogs in Washington. Regulators looked the other way while the banks loaded up on insane amounts of toxic-waste derivatives, leveraged to the eyeballs.

Well, I’m pleased to report that Stone spared the public such an atrocity. Whatever its dramatic flaws, the Wall Street sequel achieves an impressive degree of authenticity, avoiding cheap oversimplifications and conspiracy-mongering. It’s a kind of financial counterpart to his sober September 11 drama World Trade Center.

What makes that all the more interesting is that, according to Stone, the rumors were true.

“The original script in 2009 was about hedge funds,” Stone told me in an interview the other day. In the finished film, the banks are the central focus. So what changed his mind? I was thinking more along the lines of “who” changed his mind—like Jim Chanos, the short-seller who was one of a number of bankers and traders Stone consulted on the making of the film. But Stone had a more basic reason.

“It was boring,” he said, referring to the original script. “I mean, frankly it was a bunch of Russians, international players. Too much like the old film. Scenes in Dubai, scenes in Monte Carlo, yachts, and all that Goldfinger, James Bond stuff. It bores me, because I really wanted to make this about something that was happening, and I realized that the hedge funds don’t really play—they were a bad example for many people, but the banks are the key to the whole thing.”

Wall Street was to be no Grassy Knoll.

Stone clearly did his homework. I found in chatting with him that he had a perceptive grasp of the dynamics of the markets and of the 2008 collapse—such as the extent to which the banks began to imitate the fast-moving, reckless trading of the hedge funds. He rattled off financial arcana like an old-timer. This grasp of finance shows in the film. Stone displays an insider’s grasp of the reality of the world of mega-money, just as he had in the 1987 original—which is one of the reasons, I think, that it has aged exceedingly well. Wall Street received a mixed critical reception at the time it came out, but Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko character swiftly became part of the culture.

Stone didn’t get much cooperation from the big banks in the filming of the movie—“the big boys didn’t want us,” he says—but it helped that one of Stone’s many advisers in making the film was fallen New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer. Stone valued his insights, but isn’t ready to weave a conspiracy theory about his downfall. “He did get reckless,” says Stone. “He [Spitzer] doesn’t attribute it to that, but he certainly made many enemies. He did take down (former AIG boss Hank) Greenberg and I think Sandy Weill.” Another adviser was Jeff Greene, a Florida businessman who made a canny 2006 derivatives wager against the housing market.

Stone views the original Wall Street and the sequel as “bookends,” and you can see that from the opening scene, which shows a chastened Gekko released from prison in 2001 after an eight-year jail term, taking possession of his ancient mobile phone and greeted by—nobody. He is divorced, his son has died, and his daughter is not on speaking terms with him and has reneged on a promise to let him have some of the loot he salted away in a Swiss bank. He goes on to become a bestselling author and market-crash forecaster, though he still chafes to get the dough he “deserves” and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to reconcile with his daughter (Carey Mulligan).

Fast-forward to 2008, and we see Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), an up-and-coming young tycoon at Keller Zabel Investments—a thinly disguised proxy for Bear Stearns, with a little Lehman thrown in. A major difference between the film and its real-life counterpart is that Keller Zabel is run by a lovable old guy played by Frank Langella. (The members of the real-life Bear’s management team were anything but lovable—not even, I’d wager, to their mothers.) Jake, in one heck of a coinkydink, is dating Gekko’s estranged daughter.

The villain in the piece is an oily banker played by Josh Brolin, a partner at a bank called Churchill Schwartz—a cross between Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which have achieved a kind of merger in this film. As the financial crisis of 2008 unfolds, Keller Zabel collapses amid rumors of insolvency and winds up in Brolin’s clutches.

Gekko is as slimy as ever, and he pulls a double cross that very much lives up to his reputation from the old film. However, the drama is less intense than in the original, and there is no pivotal moment here, no line of the greatness of “greed is good” that generations of honest and dishonest Wall Street brokers embraced over the years.

The original Wall Street had a clear (if obvious) message: Greed ain’t so good. Twenty-three years later, its sequel provides much the same message, with perhaps not quite the same punch as its predecessor. Stone points out, channeling Sam Goldwyn, “Messages are for Western Union. I don’t think it’s a fortune cookie thing. It’s a story. If I wanted a documentary, I’d have made it.” Fair point. But JFK was certainly viewed as gospel by a lot of the people who saw it, and the same is likely to happen with this one—even if much of the inside references to “moral hazard” and to Keller Zabel, a la Bear Stearns, failing to bail out Long Term Capital Management, are likely to go over the heads of many moviegoers.

Stone’s Goldwyn-ish caveat notwithstanding, it’s likely the public will view Money Never Sleeps as a depiction of real Wall Street. If so, that’s not such a bad thing at all. Sure, names and places have been changed to protect the guilty. But the film ably captures the atmosphere of pre-crash Wall Street and the terror of the unwinding. The scenes at the Federal Reserve, with dark lighting and mahogany as in the meeting of the bosses scene in The Godfather—replete with dead ringers for Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson—are worth the price of admission.

Which reminds me that I have a suggestion for a sequel: The Firing of Tim Geithner. Let’s have life imitate art for a change.