At once a rowdy comedy and a weirdly affecting tale of working class solidarity, “Dumb Money” is perhaps the best period piece ever made about a period that just happened. The movie, directed by Craig Gillespie in full-on comedy mode, takes us all the way back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a cast of individual investors took on Wall Street with nothing but a few dollars and an unwavering sense of team spirit.
It feels almost silly to recount the broad strokes of the narrative, given how recently we all lived through it. The time was 2020. The stock was GameStop. The hero was a cat person live-streaming out of his basement. It’s difficult to imagine a viewer going into this story entirely blind. But unlike many ripped-from-the-headlines movies, “Dumb Money,” which plays like “The Big Short” for underdogs, has no trouble justifying its existence, even if stylistic choices sometimes short-change the complexity of its source material.
Near the beginning of the movie, we’re placed in time by a song: “WAP,” the rollicking Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion duet that came out in the summer of 2020. The hit plays over a dynamic montage of our heroes: an array of essential workers, middle-class employees, and college students in debt up their eyeballs. These are the ordinary folks who anchor “Dumb Money,” even as Keith Gill (Paul Dano) — a small-town Massachusetts resident who offers financial insights on Reddit under the moniker Roaring Kitty — claims the story’s center.
Gillespie paints Keith as a canny and resourceful investor with a clearly impressive breadth of financial knowledge. But the film is careful to show that Keith’s true talent is not as an investment adviser but rather as a kind of nerdfluencer. While live-streaming, he often includes small, personal moments — he wears wonky outfits and, at one point, nibbles on the chicken nuggets he’s feeding his son — that catch on and quickly become part of his online brand.
In the role, Dano toggles pleasingly between geeky anxiety and a sheepish enjoyment of the spotlight. He often shares scenes with Pete Davidson, who plays Keith’s layabout brother, Kevin, and though Dano’s naturally earnest sensibility hits up a bit awkwardly against Davidson’s unending farce, the pair eventually hit a rhythm. Rounding out their family crew is Keith’s wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley), who is unfortunately given little to do aside from doling out encouraging remarks during moments of stress.
But the most impressive feat in this lively movie doesn’t have to do with Keith at all, but rather its formidable band of side characters. Each member of this ensemble is fully drawn and thoroughly appealing. Much of the credit goes to the film’s stellar cast: America Ferrera and Larry Owens mesh entertainingly as staff at a hospital; Anthony Ramos plays a knowledgable GameStop employee; and I’d watch an entire spinoff season featuring Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder as a winsome couple attending the University of Texas at Austin, where they spend their days lounging in the dorm or sharing videos on TikTok.
Speaking of TikTok: on several occasions, the movie succumbs to the annoying cliche of filling its screen with social media clips — many of them videos of people reacting as their investments see gains or urging others not to sell even as the stock climbs in value. Overlapping and drowning each other out, the sea of videos is a cheap shorthand for virality, and they feel even more unnecessary here than the deluge of archival news clips Gillespie periodically intersperses with the action.
There are also scenes featuring the Goliath to the investors’ David — Melvin Capital founder Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), Citadel CEO Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), and the Robinhood co-founders (Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota) are our chief villains — and their light fretting over the threat of a short squeeze rounds out this economic world while adding little flavor. Rogen and Offerman in particular are left looking somewhat cramped, as if unsure whether to fully lean into a comic rendering of the roles.
But though these financial fat cats leave a limited impression, the iconography of wealth surrounding them is striking. While the various GameStop investors are often shown weary and embattled but surrounded by loved ones, the financial executives are almost always depicted on their own save for small armies of staff who hover around them in masks, anonymous to their bosses apart from the labor they provide. This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.
Grade: B+
“Dumb Money” premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. A Sony Pictures release, it opens in select theaters on Friday, September 15 before expanding nationally on Friday, September 29.
