Dumb Money

A sharp, smart and funny look at the GameStop stock brouhaha spotlighting a rare time when the motley rabble really did stick it to The Man.

It’s highly likely that you, like me, didn’t pay a lot of attention to the GameStop stock craziness of early 2021. Most of us were hunkered down in COVID protocols, focusing on our families and jobs we were thankful to still have.

The story about a bunch of Internet rebels fighting a stock trading war against the hedge fund giants involving the moribund video game retailer was a bemusing if fleeting break in the grim news cycle.

Plus, regular folks (again like me) don’t generally play around in the stock market, sticking our IRAs in the safest funds instead of messing with the day-to-day trading that seems little removed from throwing your cash down on a casino table.

So a movie like “Dumb Money” faces both a challenge and an opportunity. How to tell the story of something rather esoteric and at far remove to your average audience member? But that, of course, means there is great unknown material to tap — surprises to uncover and interesting characters to meet.

The result is a movie that is funny, informative and bracing. I’m reminded of “The Big Short,” which like this film managed to stoke anger at a system rigged in favor of the rich and powerful while also producing huge guffaws at the absurdity of it all.

Paul Dano plays Keith Gill, the unlikely everyman at the enter of the GameStop movement. A young married dad, he tinkers around with stocks as a side hustle looking for “deep value” opportunities overlooked by Wall Street. He thinks GameStop is undervalued by hedge funds that have purchased huge “shorts” against it, aka meaning they make money if the stock price goes down.

Plunking most of his family’s savings into GameStop, he makes goofy videos under the username “Roaring Kitty” talking about his reasoning, and even shows his actual balance sheet for everyone to see the results. Other small investors start to take notice, buying up the stock and sending it higher and higher.

Soon it becomes a phenom, people all over Reddit and TikTok are urging other “retail investors” to buy and hold the stock. The richie riches start to sweat, and even the financial press begin to take notice.

Of course, as a result of all this Keith suddenly becomes a multimillionaire… at least on paper. Seeing an opportunity to stick it to The Man, he urges everyone to resist the urge to dump GameStop stock, even if it could turn their life around.

Keith knows this better than anyone, coming from a blue-collar Massachusetts family with money troubles. His parents are barely scraping through retirement and his brother, Kevin ( a rarely palatable Pete Davidson), is a DoorDash delivery drone who doesn’t even have a car and ‘samples’ from his customers’ meals.

Screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, adapting Ben Mezrich’s book “The Antisocial Network,” wisely make Keith the locus of the story rather than the guy driving everything. The truth is he isn’t a particularly compelling person on his own, just a dorky amateur stocks guy who likes to share his opinions online while wearing a Bushido headband and cat sweatshirts.

But Keith is insightful and honest, and gains an ardent following of other regular folks playing the market. His catchphrase, “I just like the stock,” becomes a meme and then a rallying cry for other rebels.

These include America Ferrara as Jenny, a nurse struggling to make it as a single mom; Marcus (Anthony Ramos), a GameStop employee who enters the fray under the nose of his jerk boss (Dane DeHaan); and a pair of college students (Myha'la Herrold and Talia Ryder) facing huge loans who literally dance for their seed money.

Each time a character is introduced, the filmmakers provide their net worth, which for many of these folks is puny or even a negative number.

On the flip side are a passel of hedge fund types who serve as the villains, played by Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Vincent D'Onofrio and Sebastian Stan. They are used to manipulating the levers of capital unimpeded, and grow increasingly frustrated when Keith and his army of finance peasants keep confounding their monarchical hegemony.

These are the guys who use the term “dumb money” to refer to individual investors as the saps from whom they make their gigantic piles. They also suffer through the pandemic by, for example, buying out an entire ocean resort and moving the company’s “headquarters” there, even though only one guy and his family live onsite.

Shailene Woodley plays Keith’s wife, Caroline, rather wasted in a background role with little to do than offer occasional murmurs of encouragement.

Director Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”) makes the… curious choice of plastering wall-to-wall music against the background, often loud and/or upbeat hip-hop and rap with lots of f-words and n-words that I frankly found distracting. I guess he’s trying to emphasize that the heroes are “the street” and the villains are clueless in their bubbles of affluence.

Honestly, at times it almost drowns out the dialogue.

That quibble aside, Gillespie shows an expert hand at fiddling with both the audience’s minds and hearts. He and the screenwriters manage to make some rather complicated financial stuff easily digestible, while also understanding how it affects people from an emotional standpoint.

Ferrara, in her second terrific “glue gal” supporting performance of the year, is especially relatable as a woman who savors the chance to finally get ahead in a big way, and teach the financial titans a lesson about quiet revolution. At one point Jenny makes a decision that might otherwise seem juvenile, but we’ve built up such a reservoir of empathy for her that we grasp why she’d do that.

Seriously, somebody give this lady an Oscar nod.

Dano is a slyly charming performer in the Edward Norton role, a chameleon-like actor who doesn’t easily fit into any box so Hollywood hasn’t always been the best in casting him. This is his best role since “There Will Be Blood,” playing Keith as a guy who’s used to being pushed around and isn’t the sort to speak up or take the lead. He’s almost embarrassed at finding himself as the pied piper at the front of the column.

“Dumb Money” is a very funny movie, but also sharp and smart. It’s the rare sort of film that pays ample dividends as both entertainment and enlightenment.