After seeing the 2006 movie that Sofia Coppola based on her biography of Marie Antoinette, Lady Antonia Fraser wrote in her diary, “I adored it, the whole concept, Sofia’s notion of the young girl at a loss in an alien world of hostile glamour.” Fraser could have, in fact, been describing any of Coppola’s five fairy tale­–like films—and a better description would be hard to come by. Those tragic Lisbon sisters, “locked down in maximum security” by their mother in the pop-Gothic The Virgin Suicides (1999), affect their escape from that alien world, if rather Grimm-ly. Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte in Lost in Translation (2003) may as well be letting her hair down from the Park Hyatt Tokyo tower, pining, as she is, for escape from her smoked-glass surroundings into the neon night. And in the neverland of Somewhere (2010), little Elle Fanning tries, adorably, to make a home of a Chateau Marmont suite with Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), her tin man of a movie-star father.

The characters of Coppola’s latest film, The Bling Ring, are, like Marie and Marco, trapped in a world of beautiful baubles, enthralled to decadence, but apparently without the queen or screen-king’s discontent—they love the prison, and want only for the walls to be higher and more bedazzled. The “ring” is a group of continuing-education high schoolers in Agoura Hills, California, led by a singularly narcissistic thief named Rebecca (Katie Chang), who start a wild spree by snatching purses from unlocked cars outside house parties. In a cloud of pot smoke, blitzed on blow and the popping of incessant selfies, the crew immediately escalate to invading the homes of celebrities to plunder Birkin bags, tennis bracelets, and cash money—and intermittently partying to the verses of club bangers that seem to cheer them on in their fame- and Fendi-lust. Theirs is a world of vast tract homes, trophy dogs, and zero repercussions. And, like Coppola’s Madame Deficit, these kids fill their hollow homes with the shiny symbols of wealth, though without acquiring any of its security, and rushing to a debauched escape. They too end up in a hall of mirrors, and then prison, before the mythologizing even begins.

But Coppola’s film, which is based on a Vanity Fair article, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” that documented actual events in and around Los Angeles during the late-aughts, packs its greatest punch by hewing to reality in our “reality”-obsessed era. This is the TMZ now, in which a perp walk is a runway show, and the Facebook now, where, paradoxically, nothing is really real until it is posted online. Gone is Lost in Translation’s sort of angst, absent is the ennui of Marie Antoinette; here we are in the full bloom of Millennial fatalism. We know how it will end, but cringe all the same, when the characters bellow the hook to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” (“Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well”) while gleefully zooming their car toward destruction. In between administering doses of Adderall, the lone parent to appear in the movie before the police sting (Leslie Mann), preaches the laws of attraction-of-the-like, as laid down in The Secret. And, aside from the comic relief and karmic irony, this “spiritual” aspiration fits neatly with the general covetousness of the characters: for attraction, and “Likes.”

None of the characters actually really aspires to anything—though the outrageously pampered sociopath Nicki (the charming Emma Watson) expresses, hilariously, her desire to be “a leader.” What they do want is to live “the lifestyle,” as one of them calls it. “The lifestyle that everyone wants,” he says, recalling the Kanye West lyric (“This the life that everybody ask for / This a fast life, we are on a crash course / What you think I rap for, to push a fucking Rav-4?) and meaning essentially the same thing the rapper does: wealth, fame, and bling, obvs. This lifestyle is led on the red carpet and in the pages of People magazine, and its players celebrated (or scandalized, though it is hard to tell the difference) for partying, for being beautiful, or even for being beautiful disasters. Nothing, it seems, is deemed too private for public consumption. And, fittingly, no one, at least none whom the ring visits, seems to lock their doors.