FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2018)

Chris Smith's documentary recounts the collapse of a music festival sold to affluent young people as a luxury experience in the Bahamas and delivered as tents and cheese sandwiches. The method is observational. Promoters, contractors, and journalists narrate the unraveling while the promotional footage does its own damning work. Billy McFarland emerges as a salesman of pure atmosphere, a man who understood that the appetite for being seen somewhere outranked any appetite for music.

The organizing passion here is greed. The film lingers on the influencer economy, on the calculus of paying models to post, on the strange eagerness of wealthy customers to be fleeced so long as the fleece looked good on camera. That is the nearest the project comes to a systemic argument, and it stops at the doorstep of one man's fraud instead of walking into the room. The Bahamian laborers left unpaid and the island residents who absorbed the chaos register as collateral damage in a story about money, not as a racial reckoning. Gabrielle Bluestone, a journalist, supplies sharp commentary, though the film never assembles a broader case about gender or power. Diversity appears in the interview roster the way it appears in life: present, unremarked, not the point.

Smith's tone is rueful and controlled, moralizing only in the manner a well-edited montage moralizes. Jerry Media, which promoted the festival and then helped produce the film about its failure, is a complication the documentary declines to examine. We are left with a brisk autopsy of excess, entertaining and faintly smug. It condemns the rich for their gullibility and their indifference, and it does so with a straight face and a good soundtrack. The lesson arrives, but it arrives softly.