Pitching her coworker on the viability of a specific stock she heard about on YouTube, a middle-class nurse named Jenny (America Ferrera) argues that the bandana-clad weirdo she saw promoting the investment is unusually trustworthy: “You can see his whole balance sheet!” Jenny may not have scrutinized the data displayed in that Excel file, but in her view, its mere disclosure is a signal of expertise and a gesture of transparency. The actual numbers are irrelevant; what matters is what the nerd says about them.
Writ large, this didactic illustration functions as an apt metaphor for the entire stock market, in which tangible value is inextricably tangled with theoretical perception. Shares of stock aren’t worth anything in the literal sense; their value derives from a manufactured number—a figure whose calculation appears at the end of a byzantine maze of trades, estimations, and symbols—which we have all accepted to carry meaning. No movie has better illuminated this capitalist fiction than J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, in which Jeremy Irons says of our financial system, “It’s just money, it’s made up.” Dumb Money, the new docudrama from Craig Gillespie, is not so insightful or incisive, but it does persuasively recognize the absurd whims and fateful caprices that catapult some investors into fortune and plunge others into poverty.
Except that the thesis of the film’s screenplay, which was written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (adapting a book by Ben Mezrich), is that this disparity is anything but random. It is instead the product of a cruel and rigged system, one designed to fatten the portfolios of entrenched elites while plundering the wallets of hardscrabble everymen. In essence, Dumb Money is a slobs-versus-snobs picture, in which the uncultured masses bond together and wield their superior numbers to strike back against the established empire. It is a war whose weapons are speeches and speculations, and whose battlefields are apps and subreddits.
The stock Jenny is lauding is GameStop, and the long-haired basement-dweller whose gospel she’s religiously following is Keith Gill (Paul Dano), though his fan army prefers to refer to him by his YouTube identifier, “Roaring Kitty.” (His alias on Reddit, meanwhile, is “DeepFuckingValue”; the internet is weird.) An unexceptional analyst at MassMutual, Keith perceives hidden value in GameStop’s portfolio, an optimism that goes against the conventional wisdom of hedge-fund managers—personified here by a trio of arrogant jerks played by Nick Offerman, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Seth Rogen—who eagerly short the stock and await their lucrative returns.
What happens next is hardly a secret, assuming you even vaguely recall the news of February 2021 or just watched the movie’s trailer. Despite GameStop’s dwindling prospects as an actual brick-and-mortar business in the thick of COVID—a few scenes take place at a largely empty store, where an ambitious clerk (Anthony Ramos) bickers with an officious superior (Dane DeHaan), both regularly pulling their masks down below their chins—its share price keeps rising, as Keith becomes the de-facto general of a veritable army of “retail traders” who turn his mild-mannered refrain of “I like the stock” into a battle cry. This seemingly irrational behavior (or “short squeeze,” in economic parlance) imperils the positions of our fat cats, who scramble to restore order and regain control of an industry that seems to be slipping from their once-ironclad grasp.
The raw materials of Dumb Money—charts and graphs, purchase orders, online comment bubbles—are not exactly conducive to propulsive cinema. Recognizing this, Gillespie adopts a hyperactive editing style, using rapid cutting while stitching together montages, video clips, and textual labels. (Each new character is introduced with a nametag summarizing their net worth; amusingly, a pair of collegians played by Myha’la and Talia Ryder are valued at negative six figures in light of their student debt.) His technique isn’t the most visually elegant—there are only so many interesting ways to photograph a screen—but it maintains the movie’s momentum, holding our interest and preventing the action from slipping into financial esoterica.
Which, if anything, are a bit too sparse. Disdaining both the pedagogical playfulness of The Big Short and the ground-zero intensity of Margin Call, Dumb Money instead opts for a middle-ground approach, attempting to thread its fiscal-wonk details into typical dialogue exchanges that are punctuated by punchy images of internet activity. It’s understandable that Gillespie didn’t want to bore viewers with excessive jargon, but his split-the-difference method ends up (ahem) shorting viewers on both ends of the spectrum. Certain scenes, as when Jenny explains the mechanics of short-selling to a colleague, feel clunky and expository, while crucial plot points—in particular the ethically dubious behavior of an online brokerage vendor (headed by Gillespie regular Sebastian Stan)—feel rushed and muddled.
The movie’s thematic throughline is far more lucid, though its validity is open to debate. The closing title cards postulate that the GameStop short squeeze revolutionized the financial-markets sector, exposing institutional malfeasance and eradicating discriminatory practices. That may be marginally true, but Dumb Money—whose title refers to the derogatory term that experienced traders assign to blue-collar investors—purports to deliver a sense of triumph that doesn’t square with its narrative. Sure, Keith gamed the system and got rich, and he may have bankrupted a hedge fund or two in the process, but the implication that he and his fellow Redditors permanently leveled the stock market into a class-blind playing field is difficult to accept. (It bears mention that the picture was executive-produced by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the upper-crust Harvard twins whom Armie Hammer so memorably depicted as blue-blooded crybabies in The Social Network—which, as it happens, was also based on a book written by Mezrich.)
Where Dumb Money works is as a sharply focused portrait of the internet and social media, which it imagines as a mighty locomotive steamrolling through our institutions, unchecked by tradition and unfettered by guardrails. Gillespie, whose Pam & Tammy chronicled a more nascent tale of online mania, appreciates the absurdity of this true story—one in which a dude with a webcam mobilized a legion of random neophytes to virtually march on Wall Street—but he doesn’t condescend to it. Instead he acknowledges the reckless but fearsome power of digital communities, where committed organizing and consequential strategies can sit alongside viral gifs and cat videos (not to mention virulent bigotry). The efficient market hypothesis never accounted for memes and trolls.
Yet despite its new-age sheen and COVID-specific setting—joining a Congressional hearing via Zoom, one character neglects to unmute his laptop—the pleasures of Dumb Money are fundamentally conventional; it’s a fast-paced, dialogue-driven movie with solid jokes and an engaging story. And if most of its characters are ciphers (Shailene Woodley is wasted as Keith’s supportive wife), it does generate a sliver of pathos in the relationship between Keith and his brother, Kevin, who’s played with predictable brio by Pete Davidson in a role that might have gone to Rogen himself had the film been made 15 years ago. Mirroring the picture’s broader contrapuntal framing, Kevin initially scans as Keith’s opposite; where Keith is sensible and analytical, Kevin is brash and impulsive. (Their parents, portrayed by Kate Burton and Clancy Brown, hammer home this contrast by expressing pride in Keith’s career while disapproving of Kevin’s work as a DoorDash driver.) But the actors allow notes of fraternal loyalty to seep into their scenes together—Dano modulates his superiority, Davidson tamps down his aggression—producing a brotherly patter that’s tender as well as obnoxious.
That aside, Dumb Money doesn’t make much room for nuance; it’s too busy galloping through its material and blasting its rhetoric to waste time on subtlety. But it is watchable, and what it lacks in intellectual rigor it makes up for with filmmaking vigor. The result, ironically, is quite the opposite of the extreme financial positions staked out by its characters. This flawed, satisfying movie won’t make anybody rich or poor but instead provides a steady, reliable return on your investment.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.