“I’m gonna fucking doxx you” is the tech equivalent of “I’m going to get medieval on your ass” in this brisk neo-noir crime thriller, starring Dane DeHaan as a hacker with a heart of gold. DeHaan never quite broke through to the top echelon as he promised to in the mid-2010s but, constantly kojaking a lollipop here, he shows scuzzy self-assurance as Cole, a petty scammer who skims people’s security credentials from unsecured wifi networks and empties their bank accounts.

Cole is on a hot streak until restaurant doorman and considerably more scary hoodlum Oscar (Mamoudou Athie) gets wise to him and arrives at his home to administer a beatdown. Oscar has plans for the geek: to use him to fleece Sarah (Sasha Calle), a glamorous member of his clientele who has boasted about the $800k sitting in her current account. But after they siphon it off, Cole gets scammer’s remorse when criminally affiliated lawyer Mark (Jeffrey Donovan), for whom Sarah is holding the cash, threatens to kill her if she doesn’t return the loot.

Director Rebecca Thomas, who has worked largely in TV, essentially rigs up a tale of three heists: Cole and Oscar’s initial score, Cole’s attempt to win it all back, then Cole and Sarah turning the tables on Mark. But Thomas’s switcheroo is too clinical and streamlined, with little in the way of character depth in any direction. An innate intrigue is present around the figure of the solitary hacker – but Wardriver isn’t inclined to fill in the blanks, nor attempt to deploy Cole as a stripped-back noir archetype in the manner of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

But DeHaan gives Cole a certain nocturnal charm, and the performances are solid elsewhere, particularly Athie as the falsely affable, violent opportunist. And where it’s lacking in psychological bite, Wardriver’s demi-monde is convincingly venal in general terms. Thomas lends it enough fast-driving attack and romanticised ferment that it might just pass in the darkness for a Michael Mann film.