I attended the entire Silk Road trial in a New York federal courthouse earlier this year, and while there I counted no less than four filmmakers intending to make movies about the saga: two documentaries, at least one screenwriter working on a feature film, and another writing a TV miniseries.

The first documentary, Alex Winter's Deep Web, is complete. It's on the festival circuit now, having recently played at San Francisco's International Film Festival. And people beyond the Bay can see Deep Web when the film has its national television premiere at the end of this month on the Epix movie channel.

Unfortunately, Deep Web isn't a good movie. The documentary by Winter, who also created a film about Napster called Downloaded, tells the story of the government's case against Ross Ulbricht from a point of view that's so obsequious to Ulbricht and his mother—a key source for Winter—that it may as well be a home movie.

The government's actions and tactics, especially an unproven but suspected hack of the Silk Road server, are absolutely fair game for debate. But the idea that Ulbricht wasn't the "Dread Pirate Roberts" (DPR) who ran the site is hard to take seriously at this point.

A jury convicted Ulbricht in February on drug trafficking and other charges. That verdict, reached after three hours of deliberation, came not because Ulbricht wasn't allowed to make his case—a nonsensical trope still touted by his lawyer, family, and core supporters—but because his seized computer was literally full of Silk Road business records, chat logs with top SR admins, and a personal journal describing how he built the site.

The film doesn't mount a convincing argument for anything, but by toeing the "Free Ross" party line so dogmatically, Deep Web is unintentionally revealing. It's a neat encapsulation of what some of Silk Road's most fervent fans believe about the site, about Ulbricht, and about themselves.

The movie gives lots of airtime to friends and family who explain that Ulbricht couldn't possibly have been involved in anything like a murder-for-hire. The evidence suggesting he did—personal messages collected from the server, chat logs on his computer—are simply avoided. Instead, we see interview after interview with the countervailing "evidence," which essentially consists of people saying that Ross is a really nice guy.

"For him to say, 'I'm going to put out a hit on someone,' is ludicrous," says one anonymous vendor who speaks on camera, who claims multiple people used the DPR account. "I can see it being another Silk Road worker, getting all egotistical and crazy and maniacal."

"[A]nyone who knows Ross knows that's insane," was the take of Ulbricht's friend René Pinnell, who answered a few questions for Winters via e-mail.

Ulbricht will likely never be tried for any murder-for-hire charge, nor should he be—five of the "hits" appear to be a scheme arranged by a scam artist, while another was set up by a DEA agent who's now facing criminal charges himself. In the court of public opinion, though, the attempts are damning facts.

Unprecedented access

Silk Road had a real camaraderie about it, something which stood out to anyone who read the site's public forum posts. "Sure there were illegal things going on, but this was a real community of like-minded people," another Silk Road vendor says early on in the film.

As the project soared, DPR's voice on the forums became boisterous and triumphal. "In a very real sense, we've won the war on drugs," he wrote in one post quoted in the movie.

Few journalists knew the Silk Road site better than reporter Andy Greenberg, a source for Deep Web whose excellent work covering Silk Road at Forbes and Wired landed him the only published interview with DPR. Greenberg's thoughts on the site and the trial appear throughout Deep Web, and these are some of the only segments that provide real insight. Greenberg is the lone person in the movie to say, on camera, that he's actually convinced by the government's case that Ulbricht did run Silk Road—a statement of the very obvious that Deep Web, to its credit, does finally sneak in.

But exploring the Silk Road's "culture" falls quickly to the wayside as the film becomes a platform for Ulbricht's parents. Their view was (and is) that Ulbricht was "tried and convicted in the media." In their view, nothing has been proven.

"I don't know what's happened to the presumption of innocence in this country," says Lyn Ulbricht.

Is it asking too much to think that Winter, with his extraordinary access, could have asked the Ulbrichts one hard question? Such as: what did Ross Ulbricht tell you he was doing from 2011 to 2013? There's no evidence that Ulbricht ever had a normal job or paycheck while he was running Silk Road, traveling the world, and then settling in San Francisco. It would have been fascinating to get even a little insight into the family dynamics here, but the storyline is well-prepared and offers few surprises.

The movie rightly mentions that the government has never properly described how it gained access to the Silk Road server; it's a serious issue that raises real concerns about whether the FBI overreached during the investigation. But the movie skips over the fact that Ulbricht and his lawyer essentially turned down a judge's repeated offers to challenge that evidence. To do that, Ulbricht would have had to admit to having a "privacy interest" in that server. It's a telling omission.

Like Ulbricht's defenders, Deep Web doesn't quite say Ross is innocent, but it dares the viewer to believe he's guilty.

Drug warriors

Deep Web falls into the same intellectual paradox as hard-core Ulbricht supporters—and yes, they do exist. On the one hand, they maintain that Ulbricht's guilt has never been proven. On the other hand, they want credit for Silk Road being the boldest form of activism against an overreaching drug war and the erosion of personal privacy.

I am personally sympathetic to those issues, as I'm sure many other viewers of this film will be, but Deep Web actually shows the great disservice that Silk Road and its supporters have done to both causes.

Winter got plenty of time with people working on the frontlines of Internet privacy, from Christopher Soghoian at the ACLU to Cindy Cohn at EFF. But their thoughts on these broader issues are inappropriately rolled into a narrative about a drug-dealing website run by—well, who can really say? And it would be a mistake to believe that those interviewed by Winter necessarily share his view of Silk Road. One person interviewed for the movie told me that it had been presented to her as simply being about the "dark Web" generally.

The connection between Ulbricht's case and these privacy activists is never really explained. It's a kind of innocence by association.

That disingenuousness becomes even more glaring when Deep Web goes on to interview people with a serious critique of the drug war, including Neil Franklin, a longtime Maryland state trooper who now heads up a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. In his sound bites, Franklin points out some hard truths about the drug war, like the fact that it has become big money for both law enforcement and private corrections corporations. But the movie pivots from serious activists like Franklin to two other people who have learned to hate the drug war—Ross' parents, Lyn and Kirk Ulbricht.

"So many people have been victimized by the drug war," says Kirk Ulbricht in one interview. "It's a giant mess, and it's a story that needs telling. We've got a pulpit and a way to tell it."

The movie's suggestion-by-proxy that Ross Ulbricht was somehow an activist seeking to end the drug war isn't just wrong, it's insulting to activists. His idealism is tainted, not just by the money he collected from drug dealers, but by the fact that he hid his actions and lied to everyone around him. Ulbricht didn't want to bother to convince people that his market-for-everything was a worthy idea—he just wanted to be famous for creating the market. He wanted to be special.

Take a hypothetical example: Let's say I go outside my apartment in Oakland and mark off a few city blocks as a "freedom market" where anything can be bought and sold—I just need a 10 percent cut of all transactions to maintain the marketplace. (Suspend your disbelief to imagine this can be done without violence.) No surprise, it's mostly drugs that are sold in the market. The goods are high quality and sold peacefully. My "freedom market," when it works right, arguably does reduce harm, making sellers and buyers safer. It also inarguably will make me rich, as long as I get my 10 percent cut.

But running my hypothetical street market doesn't mean I am striking a nail in the coffin of the drug war. Likely, it's just the opposite. A market designed to hide from the law is a great excuse for law enforcement to double down on the severity of enforcement and punishment.

Activists are the people like Franklin and LEAP, doing the difficult work of trying to change hearts and minds on an issue that's still deeply divisive. Real "harm reduction" is being done in homeless shelters, methadone clinics, and needle exchanges by caring people who are almost universally overworked and underpaid. They know the price being paid by our society for a drug war gone astray. They publish papers, they practice medicine, they offer therapy, they testify to legislators—and the war continues. None of them has $18 million in Bitcoin to show for their efforts. Changing the law is a lot harder, and a lot less lucrative, than creating a website that just ignores it.