It seems likely that Leonardo DiCaprio will not win an Oscar next Sunday for his portrayal of the financial scam artist Jordan Belfort in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” As a rule, Academy voters prefer displays of suffering and stoicism in the face of adversity from leading men. Jordan’s brief sojourn in a country-club prison hardly qualifies; nor do the ill effects of too many quaaludes in the film’s most celebrated scene not involving cocaine and a prostitute’s rear end. And though Jordan gives up stock swindles for sales seminars, he can hardly be said to undergo the kind of redemption that the Academy likes to consecrate.  Mr. DiCaprio, almost 40 and still able to play guys in their 20s, underwent no great physical transformation for the role. No tricky accent was mastered, no distant historical personality brought to life. Though he has been nominated three times before, he does not yet belong to the ranks of the snubbed, the robbed or the overdue. If you want to judge by technical accomplishment or emotional range, he might not even be all that great an actor. But if the Hegelian factions within the various Academy branches were to assert themselves — at long last! — and bestow the award in recognition of the Best (Male) Embodiment of the World Spirit at the Current Stage of the Historical Dialectic, then Mr. DiCaprio would be an absolute lock.  Since the Oscars lag notoriously behind the times, this philosophical insight will most likely be realized, belatedly, in the form of a lifetime achievement award sometime around 2050. By then, from our libertarian paradise or socialist utopia, we will be able look back at the present era of economic inequality and political polarization with condescending nostalgia. At the moment, though, “The Wolf of Wall Street” might hit a little too close to home, and Mr. DiCaprio’s performance — an amoral whirlwind of hedonism, guile and hard-sell seduction — has generated confusion as well as admiration.  Already a series of reductively either-or, decidedly undialectical arguments have erupted around the film. Does it glorify Jordan (an actual huckster with real-life victims whose memoir was the source of Terence Winter’s screenplay) or condemn him? Has the director, Martin Scorsese, composed a satire of financial-industry frat-boy culture, with its crude materialism and pervasive misogyny, or a perhaps unwitting celebration of those same tendencies? A too-certain attachment to any single answer is a sure sign of having missed the point, which is that a clear moral perspective on what Jordan represents is, like an airline customer-service representative, unavailable at this time. If we decide to hate Jordan in the end, that contempt will only be meaningful if we fall for him first, and allow ourselves to succumb to the pleasure of being had, even at the risk of losing our self-respect.  It wouldn’t be the first time. Mr. DiCaprio’s wolf does not stand alone. Look in the mirror that Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Scorsese hold up, and you will see Jay Gatsby and Howard Hughes (in Mr. Scorsese’s “The Aviator”), personifications of the contradictory spirit of American wealth in earlier times — pitiable, admirable or despicable depending on the angle from which they are viewed. You will also see J. Edgar Hoover (in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar”) and Calvin Candie (the plantation owner in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”), roles that allowed Mr. DiCaprio’s winning smile to curdle into a sneer of cold command. All of these characters, repellent or sympathetic, humanized or caricatured, present various incarnations of power. They are rulers of men, masters of the universe, kings of the world.  And who else could play them with such ease, such charm, such nonchalant refusal of the easy artifice of villainy? Right in front of our eyes. Mr. DiCaprio has been using his charisma, his unmistakable movie-starness, to explore the iconography and psychology of what we are lately in the habit of calling the 1 percent. This is less a matter of humanizing the wealthy than of putting a face — a handsome face — on the ambivalence that capitalism continues to inspire. The very rich are either brimming with self-confidence or swimming in self-pity, while the rest of us bounce around among intense and incompatible feelings of envy, hero worship and resentment. Wouldn’t it be great to live the way they do? Don’t we wish we had their confidence, their influence, their suits? But shouldn’t they all be in jail?  Mr. DiCaprio is able to galvanize these feelings in part because his celebrity makes him both one of them and one of us, and also because of his specific screen history. It is easy enough to pinpoint the moment he made the transition from up-and-coming young actor to full-fledged global movie star. The year was 1997, the film was “Titanic,” and Mr. DiCaprio, still boyish in his early 20s, proclaimed himself the king of the world. His character, Jack Dawson, was nothing of the kind, of course, but his scrappy refusal to play by the rules of a rigidly hierarchical society was part of his appeal, both for Kate Winslet’s Rose and for the countless millions around the world who turned “Titanic” into a box office juggernaut.  Jack was a class warrior, locked in a struggle for Rose’s affection with an arrogant top-drawer jerk played by Billy Zane, but he was not exactly a revolutionary. He was an eager, free-spirited individualist, a self-made man still in the making and, in the end, a tragic victim of other men’s greed and hubris and his own selfless nobility. It was lost on nobody at the time that the grandiosity of “Titanic” mirrored that of its namesake, and that this populist fable of economic inequality and its consequences was also a mighty capitalist machine. There is no contradiction there, just the logic of Hollywood wish fulfillment and, beyond that, of an old American mythology. We love underdogs, and we love winners, and we like heroes who appear to be — who can convince us that we are — both at once.  In the first phase of his stardom, Mr. DiCaprio, charming and ambitious, was a perfect vessel for this kind of identification, much as Tom Cruise had been in the 1980s. Think of Mr. DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr. in Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me if You Can”: a con man whose frauds are mostly presented as innocent mischief, and whose habitual deceit is its own form of sincerity. Frank may be a criminal, but he belongs to the tribe of the romantic outlaw. Jack would recognize him as a kindred soul, an artist who works in forged checks rather than pastel portraits. He is motivated not by cruelty or cupidity, but an irrepressible appetite for adventure. His impostures and ruses deliver him from the pinched responsibilities of respectable lower-middle-class existence and allow him access, at least temporarily, to a life of privilege. Of several such lives, really — doctor, airline pilot, pedigreed gentleman — all of them his, through force of will and sleight of hand.  The same year (2002) saw the release of “Gangs of New York,” the first of Mr. DiCaprio’s collaborations with Mr. Scorsese. He was overshadowed by Daniel Day-Lewis, who has no peer when it comes to portraying archaic Americans, but Mr. DiCaprio’s character, a princeling of the Manhattan underworld named Amsterdam Vallon, was the film’s representative modern man. Like Jack and Frank, he is rebellious and entrepreneurial, making his way in the world by defying its inherited norms and codes. He is also a harbinger of the future foretold in the film’s last images, which show the modern city — Jordan’s hunting grounds — rising from the ashes of the old.  Balzac said that behind every great fortune lay a great crime, but in American literature and popular culture, the link between wealth and criminality is imagined a little differently, with more romance than shame. Jay Gatsby may associate with gangsters and bootleggers, and may conceal both his origins and the source of his fortune from his neighbors, but his parvenu status and dubious connections make him a purer, nobler fellow than his nemesis, Tom Buchanan. Gatsby’s acquisitiveness is redeemed, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and in Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top, underestimated adaptation, by his deep, hidden motive: He did it all for love, to win the heart of Daisy Buchanan. Howard Hughes built his empire, at least according to “The Aviator,” Mr. Scorsese’s uneven 2004 biopic, partly to compensate for the hurts of childhood. Both men are undone, destroyed by extravagant ambition and failed self-knowledge.  These outcomes feel like superimposed morals, and the underlying causes of the characters’ behavior less like explanations than excuses. It is nice to believe that the pursuit of money and power is, or perhaps once was, dignified by the possibility of tragedy and pursuit of vision. But Mr. DiCaprio’s energy — the grace and quickness of movement that he conveys even in quiet moments, the restless intensity that often exceeds the demands of a particular scene — is its own justification. He has a tendency to oversell, hitting the plummy accent too hard in “Gatsby,” twitching and trembling too theatrically in “The Aviator,” spiking his evil with too much glee in “Django Unchained.” But that excess, far from a flaw, is exactly what the roles require, since they are all men who have and want too much.  With Jordan, happily devoted to the pursuit of more without any of the usual high-minded or deep-seated reasons, Mr. DiCaprio achieves a kind of apotheosis. Jordan is the synthesis (to get back to Hegel) of the bright young strivers of his earlier films with the more darkly shaded studies in power and corruption of recent years. He is not quite like anyone we have seen in a movie before, and yet he is instantly recognizable. Remember the beautiful boy who perished in that famous, symbolic shipwreck? He never really went away. But now he is the shipwreck, and we are the passengers.  A version of this article appears in print on February 23, 2014, on page AR26 of the New York edition with the headline: That Sweet Lamb in Wolf’s Clothing. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Leonardo DiCaprio brings a duality to his roles, an ambivalence about wealth and success and their moral cost.