WeCrashed: Leto and Hathaway as the Attractive, Insufferable Couple Behind a Multi-Billion Dollar Hustle

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C-plus

Scoundrels are the new stars of the streaming series. Some of these programs are cautionary tales of straight-up grifters, as in The Tinder Swindler, Bad Vegan, and The Shrink Next Door. Others are products of our era, entrepreneur influencers like Adam Neumann, the subject of the new eight-part Apple+ series,WeCrashed. 

The series, based on a podcast of the same name, follows the rise and fall of the shared workplace company, WeWork. It was valued at an astounding $47-billion dollars before its 2019 IPO, when Neumann’s excesses were exposed and the company descended to near bankruptcy.

You can think of WeCrashed, created by Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg, as the third part of a triptych of recent tales of millennial hucksters. In Netflix’s Inventing Anna, German-Russian émigré, Anna Sorokin (Julia Garner) was convicted for grand larceny, after conning New York high society and financiers with her bogus tale of trust fund riches. 

Hello, Neumanns: Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as multi-billion dollar scoundrels Adam and Rebekkah.

And in 2018, Elizabeth Holmes the subject of Disney+’s  The Dropout, was charged with fraud after raising billions for a non-functioning blood-testing box. Each of these social-media era hustlers seems more motivated by grandiose idealism than conventional greed.

 Although WeCrashed is primarily about its CEO Neumann (Jared Leto), it spotlights the high-minded ideals of his wife, Rebekkah Paltrow Neumann (Anne Hathaway), the company’s brand manager who concocted its mission statement to somehow “elevate the world’s consciousness” through office-sharing. (She’s the first cousin of actress and Goop entrepreneur, Gwyneth Paltrow. Who’d have guessed?).

The series begins with Neumann, a one-time Israeli navy officer with a New York business degree, displaying a Borat-level of obnoxious confidence, while unsuccessfully promoting such ideas as kneepads for crawling babies and collapsible high-heels for the woman on the go. 

But he becomes truly inspired when he meets Rebekkah, a rich girl adrift, dabbling in acting, teaching yoga at one dollar a class per student, and pursuing enlightenment on her daddy’s dime. 

Adam, who meets her at a rooftop party he’s organized, makes her the object of his first successful pitch. And, after some resistance, she relents. Her father’s wedding gift of a $1 million cheque gets Adam’s grand plan off the ground.

Although the series is billed as a “a love story worth $47-billion,” it is, in truth, more of a competition for attention between two people deeply in love with themselves.  

Both leads are convincingly attractive and insufferable. Leto - who is literally a rock star in the band, Thirty Seconds to Mars - is often shirtless, hair carefully coiffed, dressed in dark contacts and sporting a prosthetic nose bump. 

He’s frequently given to standing atop a staircase, leading his employees in team-building call-and-response chants and whipping up a party atmosphere with a constant supply of booze, company picnics and hook-up culture. In boardroom scenes, his confidence and visionary bafflegab wears down the skeptics, older men who are somehow convinced WeWork could be the next Facebook, rather than a real estate company.

As Rebekkah, Hathaway wavers between haughty impatience and tearful self-affirmations. “I am the soul of this company” she declares, though she’s not a particularly empathetic soul. When WeWork women employees complain about burn-out and work-place harassment, she tells them they’re being over-sensitive.

Certainly, they’re the objects of satire, though it rarely draws blood. “Every great business story has an all-nighter,” Adam tells his beleaguered co-founder, Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin), before going home to sleep. 

Co-founder McKelvey is one of several fictionalized characters over the eight episodes who provide a reality check here.  Others include Elishia Kennedy (America Ferrera), as a gifted young woman entrepreneur who Rebekkah draws into the company, and Cameron Lautner (The Handmaid’s Tale’s O-T Fagbenle) as an English financial consultant who treats the Neumann’s hype with open scorn. 

A series of wronged employees — an early manager, a devoted soldier, and a new innocent recruit — are cast aside, but without showing how the experience hurt them. 

Martin Scorsese, in Goodfellas, and more recently The Wolf of Wall Street, provides the model for the modern scoundrel bio, including the over-used trope of fusing retro pop songs with the time-collapsing montage. It takes style, wit and precision to establish that anxious tension between exhilaration and shame. By contrast, WeCrashed, like the couple it magnifies, feels dubiously self-satisfied. The Neumanns, who still walked away from their public disgrace with a fortune, come across as vain and hollow as a pair of drums. It probably shouldn’t take eight hours to show that.

WeCrashed. Created by Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg. Starring:  Jared Leto, Anne Hathaway, Kyle Marvin, America Ferrera and O-T Fagbenle. The first three episodes of WeCrashed are available on Apple+ on Friday, March 18.