What you are about to see is a mixture of fact and fiction. The fact: there really was a drugs trafficker called Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), he really was in his twenties and he really did strike up the notion to make a fortune on the internet between 2011 and 2013 when selling every drug imaginable online was such an attractive proposition he could not ignore it. The fiction: the man who tracked him down was a grizzled cop in middle age, Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), who was more interested in booting down doors - and suspects - than anything in cyberspace, but once he was suspended for overenthusiasm, he found himself relegated to an office position taking care of the small cybercrime department, just to get him out of the way...
And there's a problem with Silk Road from the off, as it admits in captions upfront that they have made half of their story up, which instead of giving credence to the truth, undercuts it to the extent that you may be more intrigued to find out what really happened than this embroidery. There was already an in-depth documentary on the case which would tell you everything you needed to know, as would the original article the screenplay was based on, which begged the question, why watch this, and that query was never quite answered to any satisfaction, even over the course of two hours running time. All this really meant was the viewer would approach this as fiction, not a faithful telling of whatever facts director Tiller Russell was twisting and exaggerating.
