As a professional technology reporter I'm slightly ashamed to admit I don't fully know what the blockchain is and what it'll be used for apart from abstract philosophy about decentralisation.

Not long after it became a thing the technology industry was talking about, along came non fungible tokens. I was slightly insulted that everyone from tech gurus to Hollywood was trying to get in on the act and I still couldn't understand the appeal (or point) myself.

There was a definite sense of FOMO with the whole thing, especially when it came to a head and someone paid $69m for an NFT by a North Carolina man who came to be known as Beeple and had been making digital artworks for years but who otherwise had no claim to fame (he's featured heavily in the film).

The fact that it was at an auction run by Sotheby's – one of the companies we most associate with old money – only served to cement the feeling that it was making everyone else rich and you'd already missed the boat.

Like in countless other tools, platforms and ways of making money online (the dotcom boom, blogs, OnlyFans, the Metaverse), NFTs seemed to be the sort of thing some lucky mug cottoned onto early and made a fortune, but by the time they went mainstream and everyone else was hoping to do the same, the train had already left the station.

This film is a rough biopic on the life and times of NFTs, how they arrived with a deafening crash, burned hot and bright and then cratered, and the most interesting viewpoint comes from a tech journalist named Justin Chow, who wondered whether the whole Sotheby's/Bored Ape thing was a staged event to drum up an industry.

It's a story not about technology or art but greed – in the wake of the Beeple sale, countless people jumped on board who it seemed were never interested in owning something creative but buying and selling a new class of commodity that was only going to go up before the whole thing would run out of steam (as history shows it did).

But it's not all negative – for the first third of the film various creators talk about not only making fortunes from their creative efforts but creating their work as independents.

Still, it's a cautionary tale overall, warning us about the age old chase of the quick buck, and the hubris it seems technology always reveals when it all goes wrong. The entire tone of the film isn't just 'what are/were NFTs', but 'why aren't we talking about them anymore?', a question it answers with damming graphs showing how cryptocurrencies tanked over subsequent years, a lot of people losing their shirts.