★★★½
“I just like the stock.” This simple, throwaway line becomes the rallying cry for a modern class war pitting low-earning millennials and zoomers against the one percent in this biographical drama by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, Cruella). Through a mix of faithful retelling and thinly veiled creative license, Dumb Money succeeds in relaying a powerful message, even if it sometimes wears out its welcome in the course of doing so.
The film opens with hedge fund executive Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) learning that GameStop’s stocks (GME) are rising at an unprecedented rate. Because he and his colleagues have been shorting these stocks for years, GME’s success could mean bankruptcy for Plotkin’s company.
Financial analyst Keith Gill, known on YouTube as Roaring Kitty (Paul Dano), is initially the only one who believes Wall Street is undervaluing GME. However, his success at drawing the attention of a single Reddit thread inspires over 8 million casual retail investors to follow his example. Their goal, which never appears to be fully shared by Kitty himself, is to squeeze out the hedge funds so the little guy can win.
Interestingly, the supposed villains of the film never appear to do much wrong. The film’s closest approximation to “bad guys” are Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan), who runs the trading platform many Redditors are using to buy GME, and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), who runs one of the hedge funds being threatened by the squeeze. Their most villainous act involves a scheme to block the retail traders from buying, yet their only motivation is to protect what they have amidst a class war they never started. They aren’t actually trying to hold the little guy down.
Meanwhile, the film doesn’t shy away from the prevalence of toxicity on social media, as many of the Redditors featured aren’t shown as trying to bring down the big guys. They don’t know that Plotkin is a family man or that fellow hedge fund manager Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) is the proud and loving owner of a gargantuan pig. Jennifer (America Ferrera) just knows that she works hard at the hospital in the middle of a pandemic while making too little to afford her son’s braces. Of the four side characters followed throughout the movie, she makes the strongest case for the squeeze. She isn’t angry because she claims to know nothing about the one percent as humans. She’s angry at a system that allows them to benefit from corporate bailouts while leaving a single mother to figure things out for their own.
While only Jennifer states this moral directly, the film uses some excellent story devices to show the retailers’ solidarity while simultaneously highlighting their sense of isolation. When things are going well, they’re all shown singing along to the film’s soundtrack at the same time. Yet when Gill is struggling against the memory of his late sister, the film cuts eerily to silent streets and subways that would have been packed shoulder-to-shoulder just a year prior. It’s an excellent use of soundtrack. Only one moment, in which Gill’s character is introduced to the theme of Cardi B’s “WAP,” stands out as not making much contextual sense.
Despite the film’s many successes, one major drawback all but ensures that most moviegoers won’t be heading back for repeat viewings. At merely 104 minutes, no film should feel inflated. Unfortunately, the main conflict throughout most of the movie is whether the young investors should buy while the stocks are peaking or hold the line to continue the squeeze. The film drags through much of its middle as repeated arguments over this subject fail to achieve any sort of rising tension.
It’s unfortunate to see an otherwise brilliant piece of cinema rendered nearly average by just one flaw, but it’s a difficult one to ignore. Dumb Money likely won’t go down in history as a cinematic masterpiece, despite looking and feeling like one at multiple points. Nonetheless, it’s inarguably a film worth seeing, and those who engage it without overly high expectations won’t regret the price of admission.
