Warning: If you don’t want to feel too lazy or unsuccessful, then don’t watch The Boy Who Sold the World. The documentary feature directed by Adam Barton was supposed to make its world premiere at the now-canceled SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Now, however, it needs to find other means to get seen and get traction in a crowded marketplace.

Fittingly, this pivot-on-a-dime mentality is mirrored by the primary subject of The Boy Who Sold the World: teenage entrepreneur Ben Pasternak.

Ben is a tech wunderkind. Having already created a successful game that climbed to the top of the charts in middle school, we meet him as he is being dropped off by his mother in the middle of Manhattan to start a new venture raising capital and building a new business. Did I mention he’s 16?

Navigating your teens is hard enough for regular kids, but it’s more so when, like Ben, you’ve dropped out of school, moved from your homeland of Australia, and are navigating an evolving tech landscape. As he develops an app named Flogg (a kind of LetGo-style marketplace), we get to see the inner workings of a tech startup and the realization that success isn’t always a foregone conclusion.

With a closeup lens, we see brash decision making (spending almost the entire marketing budget on Instagram ads), juvenile behavior (wanting to give his 30-something business adviser the title of H.O.B.O—”Head of Being Old”), and severe entitlement (tells his parents they haven’t supported him despite them fronting $50k to establish his NYC stay). However, despite some glaring negatives, it’s hard not to root for a kid who is on the path to living his dream.

Young Ben Pasternak and his mother saying their goodbyes in ‘The Boy Who Sold the World.’ Photo courtesy Resonant Pictures.

Adam Barton, the film’s director, executive producer, and cinematographer, was drawn to Ben’s path, stating, “Something remarkable was about to happen, I just needed to commit to being there for it. I found Ben’s dogmatic approach to be a source of inspiration, even if I didn’t know where his journey was going.” As viewers tag along for that journey, we see that the path isn’t a paved straight one as Pasternak runs out of money and needs a new plan. And just like the smartphones he programs his apps for, sometimes the best course of action is a total reboot.

To go into more specifics would spoil the movie. And, if you’re like me and previously unfamiliar with the name Ben Pasternak, I would encourage you to avoid looking him up online until after you’ve watched the doc. That said, The Boy Who Sold the World is both a perfect portrait of a young entrepreneur and the single-minded focus it takes to be successful in a fast-paced tech landscape.

If you want to be successful at anything, you have to sacrifice everything possible. And if you don’t, the goal is going to become the sacrifice.

I’m old enough to remember the dot com boom and bust, and with the (until very recently) booming economy, it seems fitting that a movie I consider a Startup.com for the Instagram generation would come along. However, where Startup.com captured the meteoric rise and fall of a .com company, the focus on Ben, his creativity, and his reinvention make this a much more compelling feature, especially in this current age where image is everything.

Ben, Kylie, and Isaiah in the startup offices of Monkey. Still courtesy of Resonant Pictures.

The 82-minute movie from Resonant Pictures is a breeze to watch, and the cinematography is great. Though we do see important interactions with family and employees, the movie’s only real detraction is what we don’t see. Later in the movie, we learn of an estrangement of a person important to Pasternak’s life, and not being able to capture that devolution is disappointing to the larger story. There’s much more focus on capturing the business and app creation than there was on the social and emotional growth of a teenager coping with a larger-than-life maturation.

If you’re interested in how a brand is built and what it takes to make it to the top of an app store and beyond, The Boy Who Sold the World is a sobering dose of reality.