Sebastian Stan wears an unidentified watch

On a sailboat under a bright blue sky, four of the film's college kids crowd the deck, and the only watch in the frame rides the left wrist of the one in the navy blazer and green neckerchief. That is Sebastian Stan as Leo Reilly, the moneyed classmate whose set Charlie Banks is trying to join. It is a round steel sport watch on a steel bracelet, the pale dial catching the sun, the crown and pushers a bright cluster at the lower edge of the case.

Fred Durst directed the picture, his first feature, from Peter Elkoff's screenplay. It premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and won the festival's Made in NY award for a New York narrative. The story is a class fable set around the turn of the 1980s: Charlie, the scholarship outsider, informs on the violent townie Mick Leary, then watches Mick follow him to college, move into his dorm, and borrow the insiders' clothes and classes until he passes for one of them. Reviewers reached for The Great Gatsby. Leo is the real money in that world, the host rather than the gate-crasher, and his watch is the one piece of hard luxury in a frame otherwise dressed in soft prep.

The film never found that world's audience. Made for about five million dollars, it sat for two years after Tribeca, opened in a handful of American theaters in 2009, and took in roughly fifteen thousand. So the watch on Leo's wrist went out to almost no one. The wrist belonged to an actor a few years from steadier work: in 2011 Sebastian Stan turned up as Bucky Barnes in Captain America: The First Avenger, the role that became the Winter Soldier and put him in front of the crowd this sailboat never reached.