SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers of some of the major plot points of The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, is inspiring some pretty fierce debates. Does the film—which tells the true story of the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street stockbroker who swindled his clients to make himself rich—critique the greedy excesses of its subject, or revel in them?

Part of the problem, I believe, is that many people are mistaking the true subject of the film. America is still recovering from an economic crisis that was caused by Wall Street excesses, and many filmgoers—film critics perhaps especially—would undoubtedly like Scorsese’s high-profile treatment of the subject matter to be a moment, finally, of moral clarity, a broad indictment of the greedy businessmen who got us into this mess in the first place.

That no such moment of moral clarity, no clear indictment of Wall Street is forthcoming in The Wolf of Wall Street is not the fault of the filmmaker, but of the subject matter itself. Jordan Belfort’s schemes, in real life and in the film, are morally reprehensible—but they are so clearly illegal that Forbes, hardly an anti-capitalist rag, had Belfort pegged as a thief long before the FBI did. The architects of the Great Recession, however—those men in suits who dreamed up collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps—are still walking free, their legal culpability difficult to prove conclusively. If it’s a thorough indictment of Wall Street you want, The Wolf of Wall Street is not the place to look. (For that, I’d suggest This American Life and Planet Money’s series of podcasts on the causes of the crisis, Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, the documentary film Inside Job, or the excellent Margin Call.)

So, what is The Wolf of Wall Street about, if not Wall Street?

It’s about addiction.

Martin Scorsese himself struggled with cocaine addiction at one point in his career, and addiction has often been a subtext in his work. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill’s demise is attributed mostly to his own cocaine addiction; The Departed portrays Leonardo DiCaprio frequently hectoring a psychologist played by Vera Farmiga to feed his pill habit. Raging Bull, the first film Scorsese made after kicking cocaine, makes use of the emotional wreckage of addiction—many of Jake LaMotta’s problems are traceable to booze, after all, and a brutal scene of LaMotta (played by Robert DeNiro) in a jail cell is surely the most despairing portrayal of a “rock bottom” experience that I’ve ever seen.

But at nearly 3 hours, The Wolf of Wall Street is probably Scorsese’s most extended meditation on addiction yet. Jordan’s initiation into the life of the addict begins on his first job, when he’s brought to lunch by his new boss, played by Matthew McConaughey. McConaughey orders two vodka martinis, instructing the waiter to bring out two more every five minutes until one of them passes out. Then he proceeds to tell Belfort how to handle his stressful job: sex (McConaughey recommends both hookers and regular masturbation) and cocaine. From that point on, there’s rarely a frame in which Belfort isn’t drunk, high, or both.

I myself have been lucky enough never to struggle with addiction to drugs—but I imagine that it is not unlike the experience of watching Scorsese’s film, which maintains a mood of giddy dread that left me feeling both hopped up and nauseated. Frequently, I was reminded of the notion, made common by AA, that an addict never stops being an addict; the best one can hope for is to be a sober addict. Drugs can ruin your life, but they’re also a helluva lot of fun—that’s why they’re addictive. You can tell by the way Scorsese’s camera lingers on a rare off-market Quaalude, the way he captures one giddy bacchanal after another, the way he plays his character’s drug-fueled antics for laughs: he’s a sober addict, one who remembers how the stuff can ruin your life, but hasn’t forgotten how glorious it was while it lasted, either.

Now, none of this is to say that The Wolf of Wall Street is without its cultural critique. If Wolf has anything to say about The Way We Live Now, it is precisely that our economy has become a form of addiction: that the white dudes in suits running the show, the dissipated upper classes, are addicts, to a man. Jordan’s not just addicted to sex and substances: he can’t get enough of Wall Street, either. He describes his first day selling stocks as a kind of high; it’s also form of drug dealing, selling the addictive capitalist dream of transforming one’s rags into untold riches.

But Wolf also suggests that we’re addicted: addicted to charlatans like Jordan. When, in the film, Forbes runs its expose of Jordan’s shady practices, it doesn’t ruin his business; on the contrary, aspiring stockbrokers come flocking to Jordan’s side to try to get some of his mojo. In rallying speeches to his troops before the market opens each day, we see how this band of merry addicts responds to Jordan’s words. But are we responding to Jordan as well? Is his addictive charisma even affecting us in the audience, who’ve come to pass judgment on him?

The final scene of The Wolf of Wall Street finds Jordan reformed but not redeemend—out of prison, (presumably) off cocaine and pills, but still peddling his addictive and fucked-up worldview of high-pressure sales, of getting rich quick by charismatically separating your marks from their money, like a conman or hustler. At a sales conference of which he is the keynote speaker, he approaches someone in the audience, pulls a pen from his pocket, and says, “Sell me this pen.”

And Scorsese’s camera wanders over the faces of the audience, necks craned, sitting in rapt attention—just like us, addicts every one.