Dumb Money is biographical comedy-drama directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) and is an exploration of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, a little in the vein of Adam McKay’s The Big Short, though with more heart thanks to its focus on Paul Dano’s Keith Gill and his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley).

 

Paul Dano leads Dumb Money as Keith Gill, a financial analyst who in his spare time makes YouTube videos and Reddit threads from his basement about investing. His unorthodox approach and meme heavy presentation garners him a cult online audience who ultimately follow him in his investing patterns. This leads to a showdown over the stock of GameStop, a US video game retailer, between giant hedge funds and average people who “just like the stock” that leaves billions of dollars in the balance and catches the eye of the World, the United States Financial Regulatory Authority and the US Congress itself.

 

Paul Dano does fantastic work as Keith Gill: he is endearing, earnest and supported excellently by Shailene Woodley, who gives Caroline strength, understanding and makes the most of a script that avoids melodrama in moments that would surely be tempting for some screenwriters to include.

 

Pete Davidson also stars as Keith’s brother Kevin, and he brings his typical Davidson presence to the film and it works well enough. Though the other great element of the film is the liberty it takes exploring the side of the elites in the GameStop battle: Seth Rogan plays a Gabe Plotkin, a hedge fund manager threatened by the groundswell headed by Keith and his audience, with Vincent D'Onofrio and Nick Offerman playing bigwigs who back him.

 

There’s a great scene where Gabe is wanting to film a video to convey his humble roots, but the dissonance of his choice of doing so in front of his immense wine collection doesn’t register at all.

 

Dumb Money explores really well the feeling of the people swept up in the short squeeze action, those who follow Keith and his GameStop investing pattern. The film regularly cuts away from Keith, his family and Gabe to show the journey of people as they experience the ups and downs of the battle, and how it affects them. This is an effective way of driving home the consequence of the battle the film explores.

 

Dumb Money is an excellent exploration of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, with a great leading performance from Paul Dano as Keith Gill, the inadvertent figurehead of a David and Goliath style battle between regular people and the elites of Wall Street.