Review: 'Silk Road' is a procedural slog through the plot to bring down a drug-dealing website.

It’s not a requirement that every movie have clearly drawn good guys and bad guys — but, for heaven’s sake, do they all need to be the unrelenting dirtbags we get in the based-on-a-true-story thriller “Silk Road”?

Director-screenwriter Tiller Russell aims to chronicle the rise and fall fo Silk Road, the “dark web” internet site that was called “eBay for drugs.” It was the brainchild of Ross Ulbricht (played by “Love, Simon” star Nick Robinson), a would-be philosopher who decides to put his libertarian views into practice by creating a site where one can go outside the view of the government to buy contraband, deploying untraceable internet routing and the then-trendy new cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

While Ulbricht is growing his illicit cyber business in Austin, Texas, over in Baltimore, washed-up DEA agent Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke) is frustrated. Taken off of undercover narcotics work, after his last assignment ended with him crashing a car and going to rehab for his cocaine habit, Bowden is shunted aside to the DEA’s cyber crimes division — where, because of his limited computer skills, he’s told by way-too-young supervisor (Will Ropp) to sit back and wait until his pension kicks in.

Instead, Bowden enlists one of his old informants (Darrell Britt-Gibson) to show him how Silk Road works, and ends up busting Ulbricht’s one-and-only employee, Curtis Green (Paul Walter Hauser), in, of all places, Spanish Fork, Utah. Along the way, Bowden gets in a text conversation with Ulbricht — under his cool code name, Dread Pirate Roberts — and pinches Silk Road’s Bitcoin escrow account, which is where Bowden starts thinking about taking the money and running.

Freely adapting his screenplay from David Kushner’s 2016 article in Rolling Stone — for example, Bowden is based on two law officers who went bad during the Feds’ pursuit of Ulbricht — Russell presents the twists and turns of Silk Road’s brief existence in plodding detail. What’s missing is any thoughtful examination of why Ulbricht would do all this, other than some self-serving narration about personal liberty that sounds like the most boring manifesto ever.

Attempts at providing motivation are pointlessly cliched, when they’re included at all. Robinson is given little to work with in his scenes where he gets stressed over his creation’s Zuckerbergian success or melodramatically ignoring his too-good-for-him girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp, another “Love, Simon” alum). “Silk Road,” whether as a keyboard-heavy police procedural or a character study of power corrupting, goes nowhere and takes far too long to get there.

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‘Silk Road’

★1/2

Opens Friday, February 19, at the Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and other theaters where open, and as a video-on-demand rental. Rated R for pervasive language and drug content. Running time: 117 minutes.