Dumb Money wants to tell a David versus Goliath story without fully understanding David. It focuses on the short squeeze of GameStop stock that happened in early January 2021. Attention to the stock price started on Reddit, only to get attention from powerful hedge fund managers and mainstream media. Unlike Air or Blackberry, other films from this year that depicted major disruptions in the business world, director Craig Gillespie — along with screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo — keep many of the important characters disconnected from one another.
The film unfolds at an agreeable pace, not just because it is always exciting to watch folks gain and lose money, and yet the approach means the film amounts more to a series of vignettes than one streamlined narrative. If said approach is lacking, it is because not everyone who helped boost GameStop’s stock was a working-class stiff who was sick of drowning in debt. Gillespie neglects to involve a segment of major players in this story: the shitlord investors.
At first, the film does a shrewd job of defining those involved. The point of entry is Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a financial analyst who runs an investing YouTube channel in his spare time. Outsider status is a point of pride to Keith: he wears a red bandana and cat shirts, mixing sound analysis with cheesy internet culture. Keith’s wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) sees the channel as a health outlet for his eccentricity, which can also be found in his advice. He is bullish on GameStop (“GME” in the stock market) and pushes his followers to invest while they can make real money. There is also a secondary motivation: hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) shorts GME — another of way saying he bets the value will crash — so if Keith is right and GME skyrockets, then Gabe loses big.
Sure enough, GME’s value started to increase in late 2020. The consequences of this trend are twofold: Plotkin and his billionaire buddies (Nick Offerman and Vincent D’Onofrio) start to worry, while ordinary investors put their money in the stock. These investors include broke college students (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder), a struggling nurse (America Ferrera), plus a GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos). The stock price grows from $3 to $10, but no one starts to freak out until the price clears $100. Now the investors fret over when to sell, while the users of the Reddit board r/wallstreetbets compel everyone to “hodl [sic] the line.” By the time the price clears $300, Keith gets the attention of Congress and the SEC.
There are a lot of characters to manage, so Blum and Angelo’s script amounts to a series of check-ins during the stages of the stock’s ascendancy. This robs the film of its inertia or excitement, although Gillespie cleverly hides the pacing issues with small moments of comedy. Keith has a shithead brother named Kevin (Pete Davidson), a loser who busts his chops whenever he can, while the college students become symbols for the “always connected” nature of Gen Z culture. That is the trouble with adapting nonfiction: real life — especially for a story with many moving parts — does not unfold with the propulsive plotting of a movie.
On top of that, Gillespie frames this story as a familiar riff on income inequality and the one-percent. The billionaires are clueless assholes who have more money than they know what to deal with — when the movie starts, Gabe wants to buy a property just so he can raze it for a tennis court — while all the GME investors are hard-working, good-natured stand-ins for everyone else. This dichotomy ignores the powerful nature of Reddit itself, and that GME was a “meme stock.” Tens of thousands of people did not invest because of debt. They did it for the lulz. If Dumb Money were more honest, it would juxtapose the struggling nurse with some malnourished keyboard warrior who talks in memes and has an abnormal social life. Sure, Gillespie throws many r/wallstreetbets memes on the screen, except he lacks the imagination or interest to think they were created by actual people who also faced tension about whether to hold or sell. The only difference is they don’t fit within the film’s desire for economic populism.
Between the chilly cinematography and moody score, Dumb Money clearly wants to be like The Social Network. Dano, like Jesse Eisenberg before him, imbues his outsider character with a dose of humanity, while the hedge fund investors are more like aloof hobbyists, not Gordon Gekko. The difference is that Aaron Sorkin and Fincher have complex things to say about privilege and toxicity, while Gillespie puts his characters in a box that is the most convenient for his narrative. The closing title cards capture this misunderstanding well: it suggests that the GME story is “just the beginning,” while the financial world all but assures meme stocks will never again be this powerful.
Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures
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