If you’ve ever read anything about Adam Neumann, WeWork’s party-loving, pot-smoking, deck-slinging, shoe-hating co-founder and former CEO, it’s likely that you’ve encountered a description of his odd magnetism. In a 2019 profile for New York Magazine, writer Reeves Wiedeman, who later published a best-seller about the company’s dramatic public downfall, noted how Neumann’s “charisma” and “soaring rhetoric” appealed to both potential investors and the company’s employees, who bought into Neumann’s “do what you love” messaging and “change the world” messianic branding. With his long hair and grand ambitions, Neumann seemingly embodied his company’s stated goal to “elevate the world’s consciousness”-a bold mission for an entity that’s basically just a glorified landlord.

Despite turning down the filmmaker’s interview requests, Neumann is prominently featured in WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, a documentary currently available on Hulu that dutifully attempts to untangle the story of how a company that hawked trendy co-working spaces came to be valued at such an inflated figure. The movie opens with Neumann in a suit, preparing to give some pre-written remarks to a camera, and at various points we see him sitting for interviews, pumping up employees, and hobnobbing with celebrities. What’s surprising is how awkward he appears at times, particularly since so many of the other people interviewed, including former WeWork staff and business journalists, attest to his interpersonal star power. What did they all see in him that the documentary can’t quite capture?

Though Neumann’s persuasive powers remain strangely elusive, filmmaker Jed Rothstein does an effective job of evoking the company’s “work hard, play hard” culture through shots of the company’s “summer camp” for adults, its shiny office dwellings, and its utopian marketing materials. You understand why the employees interviewed committed to the vision: They wanted to feel like they were part of something meaningful. In the initial stages, WeWork rebranded a not exactly novel business model-taking long-term leases and renovating spaces for small start-ups looking to rent desks and conference rooms-by playing up its focus on youth and technology. Neumann was fond of calling the company “the world’s first physical social network,” a phrase that becomes funnier and more absurd the more you read it over and consider the implications.

The WeWork story is a familiar one, a rise-and-fall narrative with an arrogant personality at the centre perfect for the juicy magazine article, but it grows more complicated with the introduction of SoftBank, the Japanese holding company behind the over $100 billion Vision Fund. In 2017, SoftBank got in the WeWork business in a big way, purchasing a $300 million stake in the company. The SoftBank connection, along with the company’s ties to the Saudi government, threaten to overwhelm a small-scope documentary like this, tipping it into the potentially more interesting (and more critical) territory explored by BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis in movies like 2016’s HyperNormalisation and this year’s epic Can’t Get You Out of My Head. To slice through the financial intricacies of WeWork’s collapse, Rothstein keeps the narrative focused on Neumann, who excelled at a specific game (convincing investors to open their wallets) for a long time before finding out the rules had changed as the company began to explore an IPO.

The void at the centre of this documentary is not a problem that’s unique to WeWork. HBO’s The Inventor, which unpacked the blood-soaked saga of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, or Netflix’s Fyre, which retold the viral escapades of Billy McFarland and the Fyre Festival, both struggled to nail what made their respective schemers so compelling to the people who sunk money into their visions. (The answer might be that, in each case, their charm might have been overstated.) The quick turnaround streaming documentary produced to capitalize on the relevance of a fascinating news story is a helpful way to deliver a primer on a subject, giving off that authoritative explainer-y rush of information, but it often fails to offer a satisfying answer to any of the larger social questions surrounding a topic. What type of financial system rewards a person like Neumann? Why were so many eager to prop WeWork up? How does this keep happening? Instead of digging deeper, Rothstein falls back on many of the clichés about community that Neumann himself was so skilled at rolling out.