Dumb Money film review —GameStop short-selling comedy hedges its bets

Are you Dumb Money? The answer may shape your feelings about the raucous financial comedy of the same name, plucked from the news pages of the recent past. Until now, if you knew the phrase, it meant someone else: the term is reportedly used by hedge funds to describe amateur investors in the US stock market. In the film, those small-scale players are the us in a screwball us-and-them. If you’re reading this from a desk at, say, Bridgewater Associates or Citadel — you’re them. 

The true story on which the tale is hung is the GameStop short squeeze of 2021: the social-media-driven campaign to buy stock in the struggling US video game retailer, pushing back on institutional shorting. Setting out the basics is the first order of business for director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya)

The film helps the complexity go down with a large spoonful of slapstick energy. Fade in on Seth Rogen, cast as Gabe Plotkin, real-life founder of hedge fund Melvin Capital, gazing at his laptop in luxury driving moccasins. (Wardrobe speaks loudly in Dumb Money.) “I don’t see anything happening at all,” he says. The joke is on Plotkin. So it will remain. Soon he is up and running, panicked in those handmade shoes.

Sitting more comfortably is financial analyst and outsider savant Keith Gill (Paul Dano). His costume includes a tie-dye cat T-shirt, worn as a badge of daffy honour on YouTube, where he makes the case for the much-mocked GameStop as a deceptively wise investment. And in January 2021, that tip morphs into a rallying cry for a locked-down army of gamers, stoners, single mothers, college kids and Reddit users high on atomised solidarity. Shares soar. No one sells. Bad, bad news for Plotkin, among others.

At times, the wacky rancour aimed at Wall Street puts you in mind of The Big Short, Adam McKay’s black farce of the 2008 financial crash. Gillespie sets GameStop along the same timeline, with bailout-fat short sellers picking off beloved companies. But The Big Short bristled with genuine rage. In Dumb Money, the righteousness feels less certain. Was this really the “French revolution of tech”, as one TV anchor claims, or a stunt pulled by internet ninnies? The movie can um and ah.

To say Dumb Money is a mess is not to say it isn’t likeably propulsive — despite mostly involving people on their phones — or doesn’t include many smart and funny moments. (Preparing a video to emphasise his modest roots, Gabe Plotkin has to be told not to shoot it in front of his wine collection.) 

And the mess only reflects reality. GameStop was a mixed-up episode, in a contradictory era. But nuance can also be read as loss of nerve. Eventually, the film feels the need to tell us hedge fund bosses are human too, a point made by clumsy scenes of Plotkin reading to his kids. And the online masses get a soft focus too: grim corners of internet culture are referenced, but hurriedly, like small print. More than once, you feel the movie’s sheer relief in getting back to Gill, a figure wholesome enough to be an actual hero.

A headline achievement for the film is simply getting made this quickly. The price is the ragged sense of historical first draft. For now, it’s probably enough to raise a broad smile at our rolling chaos. The next Dumb Money may need to be clearer on whether it’s a movie about populism, or a populist movie. An us-and-them demands we all pick sides.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from September 22