Dumb Money – it’s a phrase I’ve used over the years, but it was this film that I learned a new meaning for it. Dumb Money is a term that professional investors use for regular people investors who just buy stocks on websites and apps. See, when I’ve used it, I’ve only used it in terms of meaning a lot of Money. Like, “Jay Z got like dumb money for selling Tidal.” It’s synonymous with stupid in terms of meaning the size or amount of something is completely absurd. Yet here I can see that these two ways of the phrase are really two sides of the same coin and one that really won’t meet unless you’re one of those famous venture capitalists who love rap music too much. Dumb Money is a film about GameStop’s Short Squeeze, focusing mainly on Keith Gill (Paul Dano). This film tells the story of working-class people rallying together around a man who just believes in the video game store chain as big financial investors are keen on destroying it to make more Money. It’s a proxy class war, at least how the film tells it, and it tells it well.
Much of this story happened a few years ago, which you could’ve followed on news sites, social media, and Reddit. The film, being based on the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, builds a good narrative of many points of view about what happened. What I do know is that I don’t know if Keith Gill is an actual good person; he might be, but in the film, though, man, the way Dano plays him, he’s damn near a saint. Having that character at the center to frame this whole thing around instead of, say, wallstreetbets on Reddit or the Robinhood app. The other characters they focus on, like Jennifer, played by America Ferrera, and Marcus, played by Anthony Ramos, a character who works at a GameStop, help show some of the perspectives of people who watches Gill’s YouTube channel and post on Reddit who believe in his cause. The cast overall really works well together and gives good performances.
The film has a good balance of feel-good movie feeling and trying to dramatically explain things to, like how Adam McKay did with The Big Short. The Robinhood part mainly focuses on Vlad Tenev, played by Sebastian Stan but feels very short-shifted when it feels a bit more important to it as they show so much about the Robinhood app on everyone’s phones. Pete Davidson wasn’t my favorite either, but he’s not as annoying as his character. The two college characters, Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder as Riri and Harmony, were fun parts of the movie but didn’t completely work as much as POV characters like some others. I liked this movie overall, and I do want to take some time to really dig into what happened as I didn’t follow this as closely to know everything, but hey, I was working in person during the pandemic, and I had bigger fish to fry those days. I think Dumb Money is completely worth seeing, but I can’t say you need to go in person to the theater to enjoy it.
Score: B