Movie Review: DUMB MONEY

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: September 15th, 2023 / 01:35 AM

DUMB MONEY movie poster | ©2023 Sony/Columbia

Rating: R
Stars: Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Shailene Woodley, Seth Rogen, America Ferrara, Vincent D’Onofrio, Myha’la Herrold, Talia Ryder, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Kate Burton, Clancy Brown, Rushi Kota, Larry Owens, Dane DeHaan, Larry Owens, Andrea Simons
Writers: Lauren Schuker Blum & Rebecca Angelo, based on the book THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK by Ben Mezrich
Director: Craig Gillespie
Distributor: Sony/Columbia
Release Date: September 15, 2023

Most people heard something about the Game Stop stock market saga while it was occurring, primarily in 2020 and 2021. But what exactly happened? DUMB MONEY aims to enlighten us.

Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill (Paul Dano) has a day job as an analyst for a Wall Street hedge fund company. He also has a side hustle on subreddit channel r/wallstreetbets, where he talks about the stock market (and wears cat-art shirts). It is Keith’s sincere opinion that Wall Street has critically undervalued that shopping mall staple, Game Stop. He tells his listeners, ordinary folks who include nurses, college students and even Game Stop employees, that he thinks they ought to invest.

In this instance, they do. Big Wall Street players bank on the phenomenon imploding at any moment. When it doesn’t, some truly weird tactics are employed.

DUMB MONEY tells us a few things at the outset via onscreen titles. It identifies its key characters and their net worth at the time the story starts. Along with the expected “based on a truth story,” we also are informed that “dumb money” is the derogatory term used by Wall Street regulars to describe individual investors. These very much include Keith and his Game Stop-stock-buying acolytes.

DUMB MONEY has some great details. (For starters, it’s one of the few films in memory that has an attractive woman with unshaved legs because this is right for the character.) We also genuinely come to like the various unconnected investors, like the medical professional played by America Ferrara and her skeptical colleague played by Larry Owens, the college couple played by Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder, and the Game Stop clerk played by Anthony Ramos.

But there are so many people, and so many variables, that it’s easy to lose track. The 2015 film THE BIG SHORT, which dealt with the 2007-2008 mortgage crisis, made a point of folding a tutorial about the financial markets into the plot, so that audiences could understand it. With DUMB MONEY, when the screening ended, several groups of audience members could be heard arguing over how money is made on short sales. It’s not a good sign when viewers are unclear on what’s driving much of the story.

We also spend a lot of time on the family dynamics of Keith and his egregiously irresponsible brother Kevin (Pete Davidson). The siblings and their parents (Kate Burton and Clancy Brown, both effective) are still mourning the COVID-caused death of Keith and Kevin’s sister. We never meet her, and we’re not sure what effect, if any, grief is having on the Gill family. It seems like this is meant to create an emotional undercurrent, but we never actually feel it.

Arguably, it might have helped to see more of the major Wall Street figures to better understand what they think they’re doing. While they are all well-cast (the actors include Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan, Rushi Kota), it’s difficult to sort out the alliances and enmities.

Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum & Rebecca Angelo, using Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction book THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK as a basis, do manage to convey just how extraordinary the events covered in DUMB MONEY are. They tell us enough to make us wish they’d told us more, and with greater depth.

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