Dumb Money’s main lure, for anyone not unhealthily obsessed by the stock market, is a stacked cast. Quite soon, the disappointment lands: virtually all this lot are acting in a vacuum. Ninety per cent of the film consists of solo scenes of them staring at phones, swiping “buy” (if they ever cave in, it’ll be “sell”) on investment apps, as the film recreates a freak insurrection against Wall Street in January 2021.
The stock everyone’s looking at is GameStop – a chain of video-game stores across the USA, dismissed by cognoscenti as a tragic, dwindling concern in the online era. One person isn’t so sure: a maverick analyst named Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who broadcasts cult YouTube streams under the name “Roaring Kitty” from his basement, and puts out the word that he reckons GameStop is undervalued.
Right at the time that Gill’s evangelism spearheads a sudden surge of small-fry investment from Reddit users, hedge fund managers such as Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) double down on their conviction that the company is toast, betting billions against the stock. The higher it rises, the more Plotkin and his ilk break a sweat. And so, battle lines are drawn between the gatekeepers of finance and “the little guy”, which the script doesn’t seem to realise is a fundamentally patronising way of framing things.
Craig Gillespie’s film aims for goofy, crowd-pleasing laughs and scores a few. Pete Davidson, as Dano’s deadbeat brother, is sporadically good for them, while Nick Offerman’s reliable sangfroid as Ken Griffin, the investor who bailed Plotkin out, makes him best in show.
The puckish Anthony Ramos, as a fed-up GameStop employee who rides the wave of this so-called short squeeze, might have been the sympathetic centre. Instead, there’s a whole lot of Dano – playing a bandana-sporting keyboard warrior whose cat obsession gets pretty tired, in a performance that simply runs out of novelty or steam.
