Dumb Money review: GameStop saga stocks up on laughs
Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, and America Ferrera game the system in this true-life tale of 21st century class warfare
Film Reviews GameStop
If there’s one thing HBO’s Industry and the Oscar-winning The Big Short have taught me, it’s that no matter how many times characters explain the ins and outs of the stock market, I will forever remain immune to its intricacies. I kept thinking about those two projects while watching I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money, which manages to strike a chord somewhere between the two as it recounts the GameStop short squeeze phenomenon from January 2021, when a group of amateur traders waged war against hedge fund managers and made themselves rich by leveraging their collective buying power—all in the service of a business that started in strip malls.
At the center of Dumb Money is Keith Gill, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty (Paul Dano), an affable nerd whose penchant for kitty shirts and rambling live videos about his stock portfolio (which he records from his basement) unwittingly leads to an unlikely crusade when he pours all his savings into GameStop stock. What begins as blind faith in the brick-and-mortar business soon becomes a grassroots effort to defy the “smart money” traders and hedge fund managers who are hoping to short the stock and make millions in the process.
Wisely, Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo’s screenplay (adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book, The Anti-Social Network), doesn’t just focus on Keith’s bumbling attempts to corral the movement he begets. Indeed, the film rightly weaves in and out of the lives of many disaffected workers and students, who find in Roaring Kitty and the GameStop phenom a way to stick it to the man, fight a broken system, and, perhaps, get a piece of the pie they’ve so long been denied. Among them are Jenny, a.k.a. StonkMom (America Ferrera), a single mother of two whose nursing job is not enough to keep her family afloat; Marcus (Anthony Ramos) a GameStop employee barely eking out a living; and Riri and Harmony (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder), college kids who go all in on Kitty’s principled stance. It is through them that we see how Keith’s videos and posts on a subreddit called WallStreetBets balloon out of control and briefly radicalize those who collectively start driving up GameStop’s stock beyond what anyone on actual Wall Street could have envisioned.
Dumb Money also gives us access to those who see themselves as above those petty retail traders. Everyone from the creators of the stock trading app Robinhood (played by Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota) to movers and traders like Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman, in full rich asshole mode), Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), and Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) gets the spotlight as it slowly dawns on the trading establishment that the coordinated campaign that Roaring Kitty and his acolytes are waging may cost them millions. What follows is a fight between the haves (who spend their time trying to demolish the mansion next door to construct tennis courts to better pass the time during lockdown) and the have-nots (who’d rather not spend money on a Heineken when a local beer would do just as well).
In a cheeky move that reminds audiences how the financial world assesses all of us, every introduction to these various players is followed by their net worth. It’s but one of the many details wherein Gillespie makes sure to imbue Dumb Money with a welcome sense of humor that keeps this scathing true-life satire buoyantly alive. He’s helped, of course, by his game cast. Pete Davidson, as Keith’s DoorDash-driving brother, gets laughs from loud moments; my favorite is his attempt at impersonating New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Similarly, Ramos makes great use of his comedic physicality in easily the film’s most epic needle drop (to Megan Thee Stallion’s TikTok fave “Savage”), while Rogen and Stan both relish making their respective characters into laughable buffoons whose unearned confidence is only matched by their hubris.
But it’s Dano’s mellowed blend of wide-eyed melancholy and unintentionally deadpan humor that best captures Dumb Money’s tone. This is a uniquely American farcical tragedy about the perils and promises of late-stage capitalism that can only be told through gritted laughter lest we recognize just how depressing a portrait of a broken system the GameStop gasp of a moment was. Indeed, by the time we get the requisite title cards that tell us how each of our characters fared soon after, you’re bound to find yourself rolling your eyes and shaking your head at the impunity on display.
Given the subject matter and the sprawling cast of characters Gillespie is navigating, it’s a testament to Dumb Money’s script (not to mention its editing, courtesy of The Social Network’s Kirk Baxter) how briskly it moves. There’s just enough information to keep us in the know without it feeling like a TED Talk on stock brokerage investments, and I never stopped feeling fully invested in its characters—nor in the larger story they’re illustrating. Smart, playful, and perhaps efficient to a fault (there’s only so many times a rap song can be used as a narrative stitch to take us from one character to another), Gillespie’s latest is an enraging David vs. Goliath, ripped-from-the-headlines tale that deserves to be seen to be believed.
Dumb Money opens in theaters in limited release on September 22
47 Comments
What seems to get lost in the retelling of the story is that Keith Gill was a licensed and registered securities trader with Mass Mutual, one of the biggest insurance/investment companies in the country. You can look him up on FINRA’s brokercheck website. He was fined, fired and is currently under investigation for breaking the law for giving unsupervised advice. He was not some ‘amateur’ by any means.
A little warning to anyone who’s interested in checking out the original book: it’s horribly dated with its portrayal of Elon Musk as an uber-badass who has genuinely invented all kinds of cyborg technology, some of it implanted in himself.
very funny that a 2 year old book can already be horribly dated.
I’m hesitant to trust the reporting of anyone who still didn’t realize how terrible Musk clearly is in 2021.
It was a magical time where you actually had to do some googling to see what a dumbass Elon was before he decided to just show everyone every day.
When was the whole Thai cave pedophile debacle, because that was when Musk’s bumblefuckery became obvious to me.
God fucking damn, I’m still trying to find that picture of him at the cave rescue site where he turned up, unasked, un-fucking-wanted and in goddamn white blazer in the middle of the Thai forest during the monsoon, trying not to look as hurt as he was that absolutely no one was paying attention to him.“Hello! It’s me! Elon Musk, Stable Genius! Hello? Guys? Several thousand of my sweatiest, most feculent followers told me you would love me to turn up here, and they seemed pretty on the ball with regards to interpersonal skills! Hello? Guys, c’mon: my internet clout will go way down if you don’t stare dropping your jaws in awe at the sight of me.”
“Oh, what’s that? You don’t actually want me here?……………WELL FUCK YOU CLEARLY YOU’RE JUST A PEDO GUY!
2018 but I still feel like that was a time where you either had to be pretty online and/or following Musk specifically to follow his bullshit. Plus a lot of people didn’t care about any of it, they just moved on to the next story after the people in the cave were rescued. That said, much like you, that was the moment the scales fell from my eyes and I saw he was a dumbass.
I mean, is it completely out of the question to expect someone who’d later write a book about what was essentially a Reddit meme that got out of hand to be “pretty online?”
…despite our best efforts to avoid it…
Despite this, still a great read. Mezrich’s casino books about blackjack and online poker also very compelling reads.
I saw this movie two days ago and yeah, the Musk part in the movie stood as awkward to most of the audience. It makes him out to be some crusading for the little guy hero and it’s just completely at odds with what he is. Thankfully, it’s a short sequence. (pretty okay movie overall, too).
Anyone who goes out with Elon Musk is also horribly dated…
Do they talk about how like a quarter of all those guys are neo nazis or white supremacist-lite
You lost me at Peter Davidson.
Same. I love me some Paul Dano but it’s just not enough to stomach watching Pete.
jealousy is a stinky cologne
You can not like an actor without being jealous, you dumb child.
I’m sure this happens to Pete Davidson all the time.
Will this movie only be playing at AMC theaters?
For a movie that “opens in theaters in limited release on September 22,” it sure is playing in Chicago September 15.
This reminds me of the old Letterman joke “opening in select cities. I pray to God your city has been selected”. It’s dumb but it’s funny, because it’s so obvious David was being snarky about the movie.
D’Onofrio with the Philip Seymour Hoffman vibes. The book was excellent. My friend’s college-age kid made a boatload on this deal; paid for his BS in Engineering. What a head start on life.
BS paid for his BS?(All seriousness though, education is expensive, that sounds like a pretty good outcome.)
He has some scholarship $ too; will graduate debt free.
These retail players were simply playing by the same rules as the institutional players. This whole episode just exposed the fact that the stock market is not about actual value but psychology.
When this was actually happening, I remember a very strong sense of anti-1% joie de vivre attached to watching it play out in real time; the trailer at least seems to hold on to that. Will definitely watch this.
What’s hilarious is none of this should have been permitted to happen in the first place. There should NEVER be more shares shorted than are actually issued and outstanding because those borrowed shares eventually have to be returned. I think this is basic brokerage risk management as opposed to SEC regulation, but regardless it’s publicly available information. Once someone recognized that the market hated AMC and GameStop so much that shorts had been allowed to exceed floated shares the game was on. But for once retail investors had a chance to cash in.
The issue falls along the same lines as a stock being oversubscribed, the SEC or brokerage leans into the idea the price will climb to the point interest falls. When it was a handful of internet nobodies, the industry looked away or down on them. It wasn’t until the exponential multiples came into play that people started asking better questions. Since no real shares were being traded, just loaned over and over again, SEC didn’t have a plan in place to reign it in.Industry hoped the little guy would get his pants dropped and they would look great… we know how that all ended!
Yeah, and because anyone who can drop money into a brokerage account can buy stocks, as opposed to the financial condition you have to demonstrate to be able to short stocks, those internet nobodies could jump straight in (e.g. via Robinhood).
What is the milkshake in this scenario, and who drinks it?
The answer to the second question is always the same: “I.”
Well it got rave reviews on NPR yesterday. I didn’t even know what it was about.Elon Musk fooled a lot of people about Tesla, and his so called “brilliance”. He bought a company, and threatened to sue the original owners if they ever said he wasn’t involved in the technology. He’s just a rich asshole from a family of assholes who buys shit and then ruins it.
Let’s burn him!I’m actually not kidding. I’d like to set him on fire.
Meh, if he keeps driving his own cars it’s likely to happen.
I swear to Jebus if I ever got 3 wishes one would be to ungrey you.
Cheers- wait, you’re not a Yank? Fun fact: I got ungreyed over at Kotaku when I criticised their cosplayer tits-based method of slideshow engagement. So, that worked.
NC born and raised. I’m still in the greys over at io9 even though I’ve been commenting for years.
Sounds good to me!
this is the dumbest fucking shit
“no matter how many times characters explain the ins and outs of the stock market, I will forever remain immune to its intricacies”It’s rich people playing craps, only it affects your retirement funds.
Ironically, these dramatic accounts of stock trading make the whole thing seem totally unapproachable and volatile, which simply prevents people from investing their money sensibly. Where’s a movie about putting a few grand into mutual funds and building a nest-egg over the next decade? I mean, sometimes it’s up a few percent, and sometimes it’s down a few person, with a net rate of return of 7-8% per year average over the life of the fund. What’s more dramatic than that?
Oh okay we’re back to lionizing these dipshits again. Fun.
Movie seems like a meme, but what a murderer’s row of talent: Rogan/Dano/Offerman/D’Onofrio/Ferrera/Ramos/Stan is really impressive.Also, Pete Davidson’s here.
This movie was surprisingly fun and funny. Paul Dano was great.I have to dock it for Elon Musk.
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