(MA) 104 minutes<\/strong><\/p>\n
As a rule, the financial sector isn\u2019t the place to look for feelgood stories. An exception was the GameStop short squeeze of early 2021, when members of an online investment forum came together to buy up shares in a flagging US chain of video-game stores, drastically boosting the stock\u2019s value and catching the Wall Street establishment unawares.<\/p>\n
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Paul Dano plays Keith \u201cRoaring Kitty\u201d Gill in Dumb Money.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>AP<\/cite><\/p>\n No less taken aback were observers in the media, who were quick to note this David and Goliath story had \u201cthe makings of a Hollywood flick\u201d. A couple of years on, Dumb Money<\/em> is exactly that, brought to us by the Australian-born director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya<\/em>) from a script by former Wall Street Journal<\/em> reporters Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum.<\/p>\n This is the breeziest kind of business docudrama, somewhere between the deadpan of The Social Network<\/em> and the farce of The Big Short<\/em>: enough jargon to let us feel like insiders, enough satire to feed our resentment as outsiders, and enough character comedy to keep us engaged, even if we couldn\u2019t care less about the subject-matter.<\/p>\n At its core it\u2019s a revenge-of-the-nerd story, the nerd in question being unorthodox financial analyst Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who goes by \u201cRoaring Kitty\u201d on YouTube. It\u2019s easy to see why traditional investment pros would write him off as a joke: there\u2019s a touch of Wayne\u2019s World<\/em> to the videos he livestreams from his basement in suburban Massachusetts, modelling a range of internet-friendly cat T-shirts while urging his followers to get on the GameStop express.<\/p>\n The key to Dano\u2019s layered performance is that Keith isn\u2019t trying to be anything he\u2019s not: he\u2019s a weirdo and a hustler, but so open in both regards he seems basically well-adjusted, when he isn\u2019t squabbling with his loser brother (Pete Davidson) in the back of their parents\u2019 car. We can see why he\u2019s trusted by his fellow retail investors, and by his devoted wife (played by Shailene Woodley, who commits so fully to being supportive she almost succeeds in making this trait interesting).<\/p>\n Keith\u2019s videos are the hub of the film, connecting otherwise separate worlds. Several fictionalised subplots follow small-time investors caught up in GameStop fever, including a downtrodden young store clerk (Anthony Ramos), a couple of college students (Myha\u2019la Herrold and Talia Ryder) in heavy debt and a nurse (America Ferrara) on the frontline of the pandemic, all portrayed, rather too insistently, as salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the representatives of privilege are called out by their real names, most prominently the hedge-fund manager Gabe Plotkin, played in an effective bit of stunt-casting by a tamped-down Seth Rogen, formerly America\u2019s favourite slacker.<\/p>\n Holed up in his Florida mansion for most of the movie, Gabe is far from a villain in his own mind: like most Rogen characters, he sees himself as a reasonable dude, which in this case entails the reasonable assumption that losers like Keith are there to be fleeced.<\/p>\n Dumb Money<\/em> is funny, absorbing, and often suspenseful, especially once Keith and his followers face the choice of whether to stay on the GameStop train or leap off before the inevitable crash. It\u2019s also more openly about class than Hollywood movies tend to be, though its populism remains the cautious, middle-of-the-road kind, leaving it to the viewer to decide what the story might imply about the broader state of the US in a more than usually tumultuous era.<\/p>\n From another angle, it\u2019s one more demonstration of the age-old principle that nothing is more American than a get-rich-quick scheme, except for the kind of self-styled maverick typically found peddling such schemes, on YouTube or elsewhere.<\/p>\n