‘Dumb Money’ review: A story about a killing made on GameStop stock is fun while it lasts

“Dumb Money” whisks us back to a time in American history, the year 2020, when Keith Gill, a Reddit and YouTube demi-celebrity, cranked up the poor little GameStop stock to improbable heights.

He did it from his basement in Brockton, Massachusetts. Gill, played with easy, intriguing command by Paul Dano, had a far-flung array of viral fans going along for the ride to Oz. They shared his fond memories of hanging out at GameStop just before COVID, or years earlier when they were younger. Some acted on the stock tip because Gill seemed genuine, and maybe smart, and certainly vulnerable — his sister having died not long before.

He’s David; the Goliaths in this saga are the hedge fund titans engineering the short-sell destruction of GameStop’s unfashionable brick-and-mortar business as a video game retailer. That’s “Dumb Money” in a nutshell. There’s no movie here without the payoff of watching Gill and a few other representative “dumb money” small fry cash in, while billions are lost by Melvin Capital founder Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Citadel’s Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman). For these men and their means, failure is a sometimes thing.

We meet other, more earthbound characters in efficient rotation. There’s Caroline (Shailene Woodley), Keith’s wife, sounding board and underwritten conscience. Anthony Ramos plays GameStop mall employee Marcus who, like working-class Pittsburgh nurse Jenny (America Ferrara), decides to steer his life savings into GameStop on a self-dare. One of these two characters succeeds. The other doesn’t. When the stock get too big to succeed without a hitch, the timing on cashing out becomes extraordinarily slippery.

The “Dumb Money” screenplay by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum knows what it’s doing. It’s guided by the easy suspense and reliable thrill of betting big and winning. Less persuasively, I think, it’s also guided by a triumph-of-the-working-class rebuke to the arrogant 0.1 percenters.

Like “The Big Short,” “Dumb Money” sexes up the money talk where it can. At one point, two of the script’s casual and then obsessive GameStop investors, a pair of Austin, Texas, college students played by Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder, discuss the stock’s possibilities while one has her hands down the pants of her lover-to-be. It’s a variation on Margot Robbie’s financial concepts bubble bath seminar in “The Big Short.”

That film turned glib cynicism into Oscar-bait rocket fuel, blasting past every thicket of fiscal confusion. In “Dumb Money” the jokes and details feel more of a piece, and better placed inside what’s actually happening. Also, the movie knows when to ease up on the wisenheimer instinct. Ryder’s character, saddled with six-figure school loans, relays the story of how her father’s company (Shopko, which went under in 2019) was owned by hedge funds which, as she says, bitterly, “vampire-sucked all the money out of it.” Like the line in “Citizen Kane” puts it: “It’s no trick to make a lot of money — if all you want is to make a lot of money.” “Dumb Money” also makes a running gag out of someone new muttering the same curse word every time there’s a mention of Ken Griffin.

The movie’s based on the nonfiction account “The Antisocial Network” by Ben Mezrich; from my financially uninformed perspective, the screenwriters do a sharp job of explaining the meaning of short squeezes and such on the fly. It’s fun while it lasts. And then? Then you take very little of “Dumb Money” with you when the 100 minutes are over.

There are times when director Craig Gillespie (”I, Tonya”) goes for working class solidarity in ways that feel ginned up, generic and unearned. It’ll play differently to different people, of course, but this feels to me like an artful wax job — a true-life fable of extraordinary, Wall Street-rattling luck, nothing less, but also nothing more. If the same characters ended up at the same craps table in Vegas and rode a collective winning streak, would that be a triumph against The Man? Or at least the house? Or just a lucky break for a lucky few?

Movies like this, whether they’re David vs. Goliath capitalist dunks, or semi-factual tales of wildly successful product launches (”Air,” “Flamin’ Hot”), have a way of thinning out and dissolving quickly. This is true even with the better ones, like “Dumb Money.” Maybe it’s because money’s not really the story here. If we don’t get a vivid and complicated sense of the people affected by it, then we, the audience, get short-sold.

The actors in Gillespie’s film are wonderful, top to bottom. They include Pete Davidson (as Gill’s chops-busting stoner brother), Kate Burton and Clancy Brown (as his parents, not quite sure how and why their son is a newly made millionaire) and the ever-fabulous Vincent D’Onofrio (as Steve Cohen, the king of the film’s hedge fund cadre). “Dumb Money” works with a sure sense of tone and pacing — as sure as Gill’s belief in the investment opportunities of sentimental value. "I just like the stock," he keeps saying, which is what millions of voters say every four years about their preferred candidate. And if there’s anything rarer than a film about money that truly makes us think, it’s a film about politics that makes us feel like there’s something to it beyond money, and luck.

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'DUMB MONEY'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for pervasive language, sexual material and drug use)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Now in theaters

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