Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019.

Compared to the brooding, horrific, keep-you-awake-at-night docuseries, Silk Road is a relatively breezy and slick slice of entertainment, with a fast-pace style befitting the material and expertly calibrated performances from the ensemble cast.

The sweet-faced Nick Robinson can be so endearing and vulnerable in films such as Love, Simon and Everything, Everything, we just want to give him a big bear hug, but hes equally adept at playing the Mark Zuckerberg-esque Ross, who is off-the-charts brilliant and can be charming in doses but is often such a self-involved smartass you want to wring his neck.

When we meet Ross, hes a hyperactive super-thinker in his 20s who has been labeled a prodigy ever since he solved a Rubiks Cube in under 30 seconds as a kid but has never stuck with anything not that this stops him from talking a big game and professing to new girlfriend Julia (Alexandra Shipp) hes an absolutist when it comes to individual freedoms and abhors government interference on every level, and hes going to find that one thing that will change the world.

As an early adopter of bitcoin, Ross finds the perfect currency for his nascent underground website, which he dubs Silk Road.

Masking IP addresses and operating under a pseudonym, Ross starts off by delivering pot and relatively mild hallucinogens, but after he manipulates a writer for Gawker (remember Gawker) into writing an extensive profile piece, Silk Road explodes into a multimillion-dollar business with thousands of customers and the product line expands to include cocaine, meth and even illegal weapons.

Hes so Internet-illiterate he thinks Silk Road is selling drugs on YouTube, but by a stroke of plot convenience, his longtime informant Rayford (Darrell Britt-Gibson) is a tech whiz with a sophisticated operation by which he sells designer sneakers.

Under Rayfords reluctant tutelage, Rick establishes an online connection with Ross and with the living-in-moms-basement sad sack nerd Curtis Clark (the always terrific Paul Walter Hauser), who has become Ross unlikely concierge.

Even working online, Rick has a knack for getting crooks to trust him.

Jimmi Simpson is the obligatory snide and condescending FBI agent in charge of the Silk Road investigation, who openly mocks Ricks boots-on-the-ground methods and tells Rick to go ahead and fax him the details when he breaks the case, hahaha.

Lightfoot quickly texted Sanchez, telling her the profane remark had nothing to do with what the alderman was saying.

Guerrero-Cuella is the manager of operations at Envision Community Services.

Online Silk Road