Dumb Money review: GameStop saga stocks up on laughs

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).