The premise of Dumb Money is simple: slap an ensemble of human faces on the viral Game Stop stock story and run the highlight reel. The star-studded meme movie from director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) effectively transports us to a not-so-distant past: January 2021. The pandemic was still in full swing, masks were mandated, the term “essential worker” applied to nurses and DoorDash drivers alike, and people were looking for something to root for. Enter Keith Gill (Paul Dano), aka Roaring Kitty aka DeepFuckingValue (DFV), a low-level financial analyst and hobbyist YouTuber who dumps his $53,000 life savings into GameStop positions and decides to tell the internet why. In turn, Gill starts a movement of retail traders who follow suit, looking to enrich themselves but also – and equally importantly – take down the proverbial man.
A David versus Goliath battle is waged between Gill’s army of working-class traders (most of whom use Robinhood to buy fractional shares, the only kind they can afford) and the Babylonian riches of hedge fund executives and the system itself. People from all walks of life, including nurse Jennifer Campbell (America Ferrera), GameStop clerk Marcus (Anthony Ramos), and college students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold), join Gill’s cause. His family, including wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley), brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), and father See (Clancy Brown), are pulled into Gill’s vortex, as the film attempts to dig into the inner life and domestic upheaval of the man behind the mission. As more and more people join the cause, Gill sees his celebrity rise alongside the GME stock price while hedge funds experience a short squeeze unlike any they’ve seen before.
On the receiving end of this short squeeze pain are Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), and Robinhood founders Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota). Each time that GameStop’s stock price ticks higher, they stand to lose untold millions (or billions) of dollars for having bet against it. The screenplay from Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Angelo, and Ben Mezrich ably tracks the goings-on amongst this vast ensemble of characters without losing sight of the overarching anti-financial establishment through-line. Though we don’t get a deep sense of character from each and every person in the puzzle, their script effectively conveys just enough to get us invested in their individual stories or, conversely, root against them and their hoarded piles of gold.
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Gillespie moves the action along, covering the broad strokes without stopping to get too mired in the details—The Big Short this is not. In effect, it can all be a bit surface level, and if you already knew the general headline news, you likely won’t learn all that much more here. But Dumb Money succeeds by virtue of its humanity and its riled-up sense of righteousness. Gillespie’s film rages against the inequity of the 1% and the systems that stack the deck against the everyman in favor of the sharks at every possible position. His intention is to provoke, and while Dumb Money is effective at getting the 99% worked up, it does feel a bit like shaking your fist at the sky and the men in the high towers above, some of whom are involved in the very making of this film.
From a sensory perspective, Gillespie plunges the audience into the internet subculture that birthed the entire GameStop frenzy. Your mileage in this terrain will depend on your grasp of – and tolerance for – online stupidity. Practically every scene drips with memes, TikToks, upvoted Reddit posts, or GIFs plastered across the screen, immersing viewers deep into the realm of internet lingo and trolling, which can get a bit grating. The experience is like diving face first into Reddit World, so a basic fluency in Reddit speak is helpful. Familiarizing yourself with terms like HODL, diamond hands, stonks, and some less savory ones might help you be a bit more in on the goings-on.
As with any decent investment, Dumb Money pays dividends by humanizing an attention-grabbing headline story and leveraging its A-list ensemble cast to tell its tale. Gillespie keeps the narrative flowing smoothly, making it easily digestible without drowning in complexity, however, one is left with the feeling that Dumb Money can’t entirely justify its own exercise in commercializing this well-trodden underdog story. That said, it’s hardly a full-fledged pump-and-dump scheme.
CONCLUSION: Dumb Money has a lot going for it, including one of the more compelling ensemble casts of 2023, and Gillespie finds broad mainstream appeal in his approach, but it’s hard to say if his humorous stylings is the appropriate avenue for such an inflammatory subject.
B
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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