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Director Stone and star Douglas

Michael Lewis' neon green sneakers are glowing in the darkened movie theater, one bobbing with that bouncy energy extreme extroverts have. "What I think we're going to see is a movie made for money by a man whose heart is in South American dictatorships," Lewis says, gesturing at the blank screen with his soda in hand. "He didn't know what a CDO was." A CDO is a collateralized debt obligation, and the man in question is Oliver Stone, who directed "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," which is about to start rolling on screen 1 at the Rialto Cinemas in El Cerrito.

"Money Never Sleeps" is the sequel to Stone's 1987 "Wall Street." The first movie (a cautionary tale about greed on Wall Street) came out two years before Lewis' first book (also a cautionary tale about greed on Wall Street.) "Liar's Poker" had one major advantage over the movie though: It was written from the inside. Lewis has a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and spent his early years working as a bond trader at Solomon Brothers. His book was an expose of what he'd learned as a trader, and its runaway success sparked the beginning of an illustrious career in financial and sports journalism, which led Lewis to movie fame of his own. He wrote "The Blind Side" about football star Michael Oher, which was made into a movie last year, and "Moneyball" about the Oakland A's, which just wrapped filming this month.

Ironically, both "Liar's Poker" and "Wall Street" became as well-known for recruiting ambitious young traders to Wall Street as they did for proclaiming the message that greed was corrupting the financial system. Lewis' close association with the business world (he's currently a columnist for the Bloomberg financial news service) and his early success in capturing the 80s financial scene has made him something of a critical expert on the "Wall Street" series. Last winter, when the sequel was still in production, he met with Stone for a piece that ran in Vanity Fair, but Stone seemed more interested in showing off footage of interviews he'd done with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez than in talking about his film on the downfall of capitalism, Lewis said.

The original "Wall Street" story follows the young trader Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, as he is mentored by the corrupt financier Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. Gekko teaches Fox that "greed is good," and initiates him into the sneaky art of insider trading. They both end up in jail.

In the sequel, Gekko is back. Our El Cerrito theater is nearly empty, but one of the first scenes—the officer checking him out of jail hands Gekko a massive 1980s mobile phone—gets an appreciative laugh. Played once again by Douglas, the older Gekko is a more complex and multilayered character this time around and Douglas' performance is one of the few redeeming qualities Lewis is about to find in the film.

The movie focuses on youthful Wall Streeter, Jacob Moore, played by Shia LaBeouf. Moore is engaged to Gekko's daughter, Winnie Gekko, played by Carey Mulligan, who has disowned her father and everything he stands for.

About ten minutes into the movie, Lewis spots his first flaw, as onscreen Moore takes a call with a wild-haired PhD-type who is promising more investment money for research on cold fusion. "This job doesn't exist," Lewis whispers to me. "So we've got a problem there." (Apparently, the folks who do this are called venture capitalists and live here in California, not in New York.)

A few minutes later, Lewis finds another. "Trading floors are quiet," he whispers, gesturing at the on-screen bustle in the office of Moore's fictional firm. "They don't have enough faith in reality," he says of the moviemakers.

Moore is not as innocent as Fox was in the first film (Lewis: "There's no innocence left on Wall Street."), but otherwise his relationships with the older men follow the same pattern of initial respect followed by betrayal. (Lewis: "It's true that younger men and older men have this thing there. That's not false.")

In "Money Never Sleeps," Moore's firm is the first to go in the 2008 crash. Moore's mentor, the head of the firm, reacts by throwing himself in front of a subway car. Then things get crazy. Moore ends up working for a modern day Gekko-type, as well as somehow winding up under the actual Gekko's wing, and then there's the testosterone-laden motorcycle race through the woods...

I won't give away the ending, but it's as far-fetched as the rest of it. Lewis will tell me later he was counting the minutes until the end.

Finally, the movie is over, we're in the car on the way back to Lewis' office in North Berkeley, and he's trying to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. "When a movie's bad, there are so many ways it is bad you kinda can't get to the bottom of it. You don't even want to think about it anymore," he says.

Lewis ultimately decides that the actors did an excellent job with a crappy script: "It reads like if you gave Fidel Castro a scriptwriting software and told him to write about Wall Street," he says, grinning at his own joke.

What seems to disappoint him most is that the film fails to truly capture how bad things actually got on Wall Street in 2008. "The truth is much worse than the movie depicts," Lewis says. "No one killed himself. No one even accepted they did anything wrong. No one got their comeuppance, because everyone got away with it."

In fact, Lewis points out, the scriptwriters didn't even get the 2008 meltdown terminology right. The only mention of subprime loans in "Money Never Sleeps" occurs during a speech Gekko delivers to Fordham business students, but Gekko calls them "subprimes,"— something, Lewis says, a trader or broker would never say.

Lewis says he knows financial concepts are complicated, but not getting them right is a shame. "They insult the intelligence of the audience," he says.

Lewis is famous for doing exactly the opposite: He takes massive, complicated topics, like the entire Greek economy, and explains them with humor and intelligence, without sinking into the insider jargon that makes so much financial reporting impenetrable to the average reader. His premise is that anyone can understand this stuff—and people do.

Lewis' most recent book, "The Big Short," is his own version of how bad things actually got on Wall Street in 2008. It explains in great detail how trading subprime loans, complicated debt products like CDOs, and rampant speculation led to the greatest stock market plunge since the Great Depression. The book rocketed to the New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction almost as soon as it came out and it has remained there. This is the book's 28th week on the list and it is still at number 11.

The failure of "Money Never Sleeps" to accurately convey the Wall Street mess has not dissuaded Lewis from thinking such a movie can be made. He says the movie rights to "The Big Short" have already been purchased, though there are no definite shooting plans yet. "With that kind of success with a bad movie about Wall Street," he asks, "What about a good movie?"