A film review by Craig J. Koban December 20, 2023

DUMB MONEY

2023, R, 104 mins.

Paul Dano as Keith Gill  /  Pete Davidson as Kevin Gill  /  America Ferrera as Jenny Campbell  /  Nick Offerman as Ken Griffin  /  Anthony Ramos as Marcos  /  Sebastian Stan as Vlad Tenev  /  Shailene Woodley as Caroline Gill  /  Seth Rogen as Gabe Plotkin  /  Vincent D'Onofrio as Steven A. Cohen  /  Talia Ryder as Harmony  /  Olivia Thirlby as Yaara Bank-Plotkin

Director Craig Gillespie (I, TONYA) delves into a very recent fact-based story in DUMB MONEY about the GameStop short squeeze of 2021 and how an underground movement of lowly investors tried to beat the big wig Wall Street billionaire investors at their own game.  

This so-called army of retail traders - referred to as "dumb money" by the heaviest Wall Street hitters - made huge disruptions to the financial world by embracing and propping up the stock of a video game retailer that was, for all intents and purposes, quickly becoming obsolete and on the verge of bankruptcy.  Finding inspiration in the 2021 Ben Mezrich book THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK, Gillespie attempts - with reasonable, if not sometimes inconsistent success - to relay this David versus Goliath stock story and all the eccentric personalities behind it.  To say that this film might be an awfully convoluted watch for many (including myself) is kind of an understatement, especially for those that may have difficulty understating complicated Wall Street concepts, lingo, and so forth.  But, to Gillespie's credit, his film is never dull and is genuinely an enjoyable watch.  

So...you might be asking...what in the world is this "short squeeze" in question?  How did GameStop's shares go from $18 to $500 in less than a month?  Wow profited and who lost as a result of that? 

The short answer is that it's complicated, but I'll do my best to pare it down as simply as I can here.  

What you need to know is this: 

The biggest hedge funds in the world make a fortune off of the failure of companies going under.  They bet that companies like GameStop will get buried six feet under and die and then profit off of their demise (yeah, I'm still trying to process that).  

What happened with GameStop was pretty unprecedented.  Financial analyst by day and YouTuber by night Keith Gill managed to convince his legion of followers online to buy GameStop stock...and many, many, many of them did, which drove its stock price through the roof and many times over the initial low buy-in rate.  

This, predictably enough, caused billionaire investors to panic, seeing they were short selling the stock in hopes of getting rich quickly as a result, because - hey! - they thought this company was going bankrupt.  

Still with me?

This whole ordeal represented a rare intersection of unfathomably rich one per centers going to war with countless poor to middle income 99 per centers, and it all came to a head when one company (Robinhood) colluded with a hedge fund owner to stop this stock from trading altogether.  It all boiled over with Congressional investigations as to how this happened and who was right and who was wrong.  The uber rich felt that Keith cheated somehow or had insider trading knowledge, because how could "dumb money" like him profit so much off of GameStop while they lost billions?  In turn, Keith professes innocence on that charge and insists that he just wanted to upend the market and teach the fat cat investors a lesson.  

Keith is played in the film by the always reliable Paul Dano, and as he's introduced in the story, he's a seemingly ordinary middle-class working man trying to make ends meet and provide for his devoted wife, Caroline (a somewhat marginalized Shailene Woodley).  His work as a financial analyst provides him with a deep understanding of the stock market, but his heart is really not in his work.  What he's really passionate about are (a) running track and field and (b) running a financial advice YouTube channel under the alias Roaring Kitty, for which he has a fairly large and loyal viewer base for his nightly streams.  He starts to preach the virtues of GameStop on his stream as an undervalued company and stock, and he's a man of his word by publicly investing his family's entire life savings of $53,000 into buying the stock.  Word quickly spreads online of Keith's massive gamble, leading countless followers to buy up the stock as well...and they told their friends...and they told their friends...and so on and so on.  With an alarming amount of time, GameStop stock prices hit the stratosphere, making Keith (and his Roaring Kitty followers) rich in very quick measure.  Then the hedge fund managers take notice when their usually winning strategy of short selling is now failing miserably.  One of them is Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), and he starts to truly panic when he loses not millions, but billions.  Other even more powerful hedge fund managers - like Steve Cohen (Vincent D'Onofio) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) - are also losing and are shocked by this turn of events.  

Now, how does the aforementioned Robinhood figure into all of this?  This company runs a commissions-free stock trading app that all of Keith's followers are using to buy up as much GameStop stock as possible, which catches the eye of co-owner (Sebastian Stan).  Keith's most devoted fans hold the line and refuse to sell their newly acquired stock, like a struggling nurse Jenny (America Ferrera) and a GameStop clerk, Marcus (Anthony Ramos).  Keith, by his own admission, just wants himself and his followers to have an equal part of the money pie like the billionaires who often exploit the system for their own gain.  One of the best aspects of DUMB MONEY is how Gillespie is able to tell us how this entire situation affected so many people at different ends of the economic hemisphere.  For obvious financial reasons, Keith wants access to what would be (for most) life-changing amounts of money to secure his future, as do his followers.  One of the struggles with this occurs when they see their investments in GameStop go through the roof and are feeling pressure to sell, which goes against Keith's advice to them (if a massive sell-off happens...then it's over).  Then there are the hedge fund managers and leaders of Robinhood, with all of them being amusingly shocked by how this small movement is costing them dearly, leaving them pondering what the hell to do next.  If anything, DUMB MONEY is on solid ground by showing how the skewed imbalance between all these players was - as extraordinary as it seemed two years ago - leveled off considerably.

Where DUMB MONEY falters, though, is in its balancing of hijinks and laughs with the darker underbelly of the financial world presented here.  Deep down, this film highlights the damning conundrums of capitalism run afoul and how the hedge fund managers have been allowed to play fast and loose within the system to become billionaires at the expense of downtrodden people (and, yes, companies going bye-bye).  Gillespie is clearly trying to frame these rich power players as the "bad guys" of his piece and, in turn, props up Keith and his followers as the underdog "good guys."  There is a concentrated effort here to humanize Keith and make viewers connect with him the most, but I think the film loses touch with some of the inherent complexities (and ethical questions) that surround this man.  He did, after all, become a millionaire relatively overnight and was financially set for life by his ambitious - but insanely risky - scheme.  At the same time, his loyal die-hard fans were embroiled in make-or-break decisions with their money that could - if the whole plan backfired - bankrupt them.  Their overall hope, however, is to get rich quick and disrupt what they consider to be an unfair status quo.  It's true that some of Keith's devotees made off spectacularly well, but there were others that were ruined by it.  That, and Keith ended up selling his stock and then all but vanished off the web (he now lives a life of obscurity).  Oh, and the government ended up doing very little - if anything - to change the rules of the system afterward, which begs the question as to what Keith's movement did to change anything at all? 

Most of the normal average Joe investors here are fictionalized and, to the film's detriment, we get so very little time with them that they don't become the type of flesh and blood characters that I think Gillespie was aiming for.  The film is noteworthy for showing the absolute thrill of these people throwing caution to the wind with their livelihoods and support Keith's scheme without looking back, but most of them are just sketchily developed and rarely sustain our rooting interest.  Then there are other characters (like Keith's chemically dependent brother, played by Pete Davidson on typecast autopilot) that add little added depth to the proceedings.  I do think that Rogen is well cast as his befuddled billionaire that feels the financial world imploding on him, and Nick Offerman is perfect as his poker-faced and soft-spoken evil investor.  Still, there's a lot that audience members have to wade through here, and Gillespie - trying as he can - attempts to evoke the look and feel of the very similar THE BIG SHORT, but that Adam McKay film did a better job of schooling viewers on the labyrinthine nature of Wall Street.  Maybe DUMB MONEY would have worked better if it was a bit more more historically removed from its subject (after all, it happened just two years ago).  Much of the film feels a tad rushed, leading to a sense that the finer details have been glossed over.