---

Just about nothing will convince you in the course of Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money that the incident it’s based on — the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021 — needed to be dramatized even when it’s being entertaining. It’s a well-acted and -written movie that doesn’t achieve much more than what a documentary or a news feature could (and has). The squeeze, for those who don’t already know, involved a group of average-Joe traders amped by a Reddit-savvy, red bandana- and cat shirt-wearing YouTuber going by Roaring Kitty jacking up GameStop’s stock price — a move whose consequences underscored just how set up the stock market is against those who aren’t already sitting pretty up at the top.

In Dumb Money, Roaring Kitty — whose real name is Keith Gill and who in life made a living as a financial analyst at MassMutual — is played by a floppy-haired Paul Dano. The film oscillates between his ascension as a financial folk hero and its effect on his family (Shailene Woodley, always good, doesn’t get to do much in the wife role, though Pete Davidson steals scenes as his fuckup brother); the scrambling of the icky rich guys most threatened by Gill’s leadership (Seth Rogen, Sebastian Stan, and Nick Offerman among them); and several everyday people who could stand to use the financial relief dangled in front of them by the GameStop coup. There’s Jennifer (America Ferrera), a nurse and single mom at her wits’ end trying to support her family; Marcus (Anthony Ramos), a clerk at a GameStop run by a humorless manager with braces and a rattail (Dane DeHaan); and Riri and Harmony (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder), stylish students in college and in love. Everyone is introduced with on-screen text announcing their net worth to accentuate just how big the gap is between these haves and have-nots. 

Dumb Money’s band of everyday people, mostly unacquainted with the stock market until now, are usually in a scene when the movie is most engaging. They don’t feel, the way Dano or Stan do in their bad wigs, cast in the chintziness of reenactment the movie so often is subjected to, to the point that you want to spend more time with them than this movie, more about narrative particulars than characterological ones, allows. (Screenwriters and erstwhile Wall Street Journal staffers Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, adapting the Ben Mezrich book The Antisocial Network, have the tough task of making the dialogue lucidly explanatory, clever, and humane.)

That sense of reenactment makes the meant-to-be-thrilling scenes leading up to the looming crashing and burning feel curiously inert, even as Gillespie dutifully puts up on screen the excitement of its financially strapped characters suddenly facing possibly big rewards, the feverish (and dependably off-color) online chatter among the Reddit group over which Gill lorded, and the escalating news reports that something is going on with the GameStop stock worth paying attention to. Gillespie is a lot better at translating the pit-in-your-stomach worry once things start to go awry; the final act of Dumb Money ably straddles the line between infuriating and galvanizing in a way that makes you wish the leadup was just as persuasive.

Photo credit: Claire Folger/Columbia Pictures