Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam are two guys from New York. They both have day jobs and their own separate blogs, but together, under the nom-de-vid the Internets Celebrities, they create short, bristling, funny documentary essays on topics ranging from how to remix the Big Mac to the role of the bodega in the urban ecosystem. With plenty of R-rated language and humor, they drive home certain essential truths about life in big cities in general and in New York in particular. Their political axe likes to fall on topics like injustice and poverty, but without the single-minded one-sidedness of documentary-makers like Michael Moore, and their seemingly ad hoc style lends their videos an open, accessible quality: They are meant to entertain, and maybe you’ll learn something.

Shot on the street and in various check-cashing stores, Checkmate sketches the landscape of the check-cashing industry in Brooklyn. Why are there always jewelry stores next to check-cashing spots? Why is there 1 bank per 1,000 people in fancy Brooklyn Heights, but only 1 per 50,000 people in gritty Bushwick? In discursive style, Rafi and Dallas take us around the borough, talking to people on the street and walking us through the mechanics of the check-cashing spot to illustrate how this particular part of the cycle of debt operates. And we learn how the cycle changes. “Internets,” Dallas jokes, “you know you’ve made it when you go from check-cashing fees to ATM fees.” Ben Popken, an editor at consumerist.com, makes an appearance as a talking head, but it’s mostly Dallas and Rafi on camera, riffing on the absurdities of our new, “eff-ed the eff up” economy.

The Internets Celebrities (the name, by the way, is very much toungue in cheek) are doing something unique on YouTube: using it as vehicle for informed, pointed documentary-making. The rough style is part of the message, that this is off-the-cuff, not watered down. There’s no critical distance here, and the video itself has a loose style perfectly suited to embeddable online video. But the lack of obvious slickness obscures how slick Checkmate actually is—it’s a 10-minute video about “check-cashing” of all things, but it’s already had nearly half a million views. Are they indeed, as they claim, “the Woodward and Bernstein for the YouTube generation”?