“Follow that meltdown.” This is what film audiences do, in their way. Blue Jasmine subtly includes a new meltdown with the old – personal breakdown. The heroine is driven to unstable, delusional behaviour by the husband’s crimes and disgrace. Look around and see the breakdown motif quietly stealing into movies, from Tom Hardy’s imploding hero who loses a career and family overnight in Stephen Knight’s forthcoming Locke – Knight created Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, the boom-and-bust TV quiz show, before becoming a screenwriter and director – to Robert Redford as a lone yachtsman literally all at sea in JC?Chandor’s All Is Lost, premiered at Cannes, the filmmaker’s one-man-against-the-ocean follow-up to his Wall Street ensemble drama, Margin Call.

Redford was once the movie world’s Jay Gatsby, of course (in the 1974 film of F?Scott Fitzgerald’s novel). In 2013, Gatsby has returned to our screens, that career fraudster turned romantic hero. Is his comeback the sign of a mellower, more understanding approach to white-collar crime – or just a sign that we are moving on and there are bigger, more amplified dramas that can derive, closely or distantly, from business chicanery?

If there is a new “meltdown” in movie narratives, it may be one that pours two different but complementary avenues of potential box office gold. Both are responses, or counter-reactions, to the financial crisis. One is the solo crack-up drama. The other is a kind of warning cry saying to us: “Hey, perhaps you’ve been looking the wrong way.”

Maybe it is not the bigwig brokers and braces-wearers we should be monitoring today: it is the youngsters right under our noses. They are running loose. They are internet-savvy; money-savvy; adventure-hungry; mischief-hungry. Some of them have picked up their elders’ bad habits. Be dishonest if it works, if it is a little glamorous, and if you can get away with it.

Look at The Bling Ring. Look at Spring Breakers. Look even at the new Runner Runner, where Princeton student Justin Timberlake runs a borderline criminal online campus gambling racket and then aspires to meet the barely older internet casino king (Ben Affleck), offshore with his youngster courtiers in Costa Rica.

Older people today are scared of the moment when younger people’s knowledge – of just about everything – overtakes older people’s. The young are fast learners and are catching up. It is a paranoia one can see at work in InRealLife, Beeban Kidron’s new documentary about net-obsessed teenagers. Almost every 13-year-old knows more about the internet than almost every 53-year-old. And you don’t need to have seen Alex Gibney’s documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, to know that a young army computer nerd – Bradley Manning – can all but bring down the Pentagon.

Kids running amok with their limbs and bodies we are used to. Kids running amok with their brains is new and terrifying. To the fantasy-prone alarmists of Moviedom it is a fresh world jihad, ready to challenge civilisation. The science fiction film Elysium makes a metaphor of it. It envisages a solar system in which older, richer people have gone off-world to populate a giant space station, turning it into a “safe” and luxurious retreat, full of rich condos and golf courses. It looks like a Donald Trump dream – or nightmare, according to your taste.

Down on earth remain the resentful, ingenious troublemakers. The young, insurgent, dispossessed. They are as clever as the Elysium-dwellers with less resource. They can build or brainstorm any device to tackle space, time, the cosmos. So it is only a matter of time before they take over that other world and prove, finally, that there is no such thing as security any more in the universe, except of their choosing. Cracking banks, from inside or outside, is for old people. Give a youngster a computer and he can crack absolutely anything.