‘Dumb Money’ Review: Revenge of the Amateur Stock Traders

“Dumb Money,” an lively, ingratiating dramatization of the GameStop inventory craze of 2021, presents an attention-grabbing problem for its screenwriters, who need to juggle two types of jargon in fast-paced dialogue.

That January, newbie merchants, inspired by on-line posts and movies, wildly drove up the inventory worth of the online game retailer GameStop, an organization that seasoned buyers had written off. Hedge funds that had been shorting the inventory — in essence, betting that it could fall — wound up dealing with large losses, because of a military of ostensible novices.

So what’s harder to maintain understandable for an viewers: the obfuscatory verbiage of people that converse Wall Street and deal with finance as a form of secret, clubby code, or the mystifying memes of the Reddit and YouTube customers, who’re proven likening income to hen tenders and utilizing the misspelling “HODL” to point that they don’t wish to promote?

“Dumb Money,” to its credit score, retains almost all the pieces clear. Based on “The Antisocial Network,” a guide that the writer Ben Mezrich (“Bringing Down the House”) rotated in lower than eight months, the film comprises greater than a touch of David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” each in its lighting schemes and its efforts to wring suspense from pictures of individuals taking a look at units. (The two movies share an editor, Kirk Baxter. Also, considerably oddly, “Dumb Money” counts amongst its government producers the real-life twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, “Social Network” characters and the founders of a cryptocurrency alternate. Teddy Schwarzman, son of the Blackstone chief government Stephen A. Schwarzman, offered financing for the film.)

The precise director is Craig Gillespie, who treats the fabric with the identical irreverence he delivered to “I, Tonya” (2017), his dementedly humorous tackle the Tonya Harding scandal. The pressure reveals greater than in that movie, partly as a result of “Dumb Money” is basically earnest. The film tells a narrative during which an assortment of have-not strangers — led by a former monetary educator whose YouTube costume, one character notes, owes one thing to Luke Wilson’s headwear in “The Royal Tenenbaums” — band collectively to carry a inventory even when cashing out could be unimaginably profitable for them individually.

Their on-line boards could also be crammed with juvenile humor, and their customers might not be snappily dressed, however these are folks attempting to feed their households and pay their money owed. There’s nothing jaunty about that, attempt because the film would possibly to maintain issues energetic with a Cardi B needle drop, TikTok-filled imagery and congressional grillings cleverly edited to make it look as if the actors had been interacting with real-life lawmakers. (Some news clips function the New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.) Onscreen, the title is cheekily accompanied by an asterisk, to notice that the phrase “dumb money” is utilized by Wall Street to deride dabbling buyers.

The sardonic strategy — which already has critics name-checking “The Big Short” — isn’t as recent as it could have been even a couple of years in the past. The former Wall Street Journal reporters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo’s script surveys a variety of people that jumped on the GameStop bandwagon. All of the principal characters, lots of them innovations meant to face in for real-life counterparts, are launched with textual content indicating their estimated internet value.

The GameStop cult’s unintended chief is Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who has a number of noms de internet and a factor for cat memes. After Gill explains on-line why he thinks GameStop is undervalued, his bullishness conjures up others. His adherents, who by no means meet, embrace Jenny (America Ferrera), a nurse and single mom in Pittsburgh; Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold), undergraduates in Austin, Texas; and Marcos (Anthony Ramos), who works at a GameStop in Detroit and has to endure the sneering calls for of his boss (Dane DeHaan).

“Dumb Money” isn’t totally content material to wonk out. It can’t simply be an funding film; it additionally must be a home drama. That is sensible to the extent that the story considerations folks’s livelihoods (Shailene Woodley performs Gill’s spouse, who helps his YouTubing and sweats by the agonizing choices about whether or not to stroll with tens of millions). The humanizing efforts are much less impressed when “Dumb Money” falls again on sibling-rivalry tropes. Pete Davidson will get a couple of laughs as Gill’s brother, who confuses Warren Buffett with Jimmy Buffett and takes a lax ethic towards his DoorDash gig.

Better, by advantage of being forged in opposition to kind, are Seth Rogen, largely in a straight-man position, because the hedge fund chief Gabe Plotkin, whose funds plummet because the GameStoppers’ portfolios explode, and Dano, who by no means condescends to a personality he would possibly simply have performed as a joke. It’s onerous to not root for Gill, in his dorky headband, to take down individuals who have staked huge sums in opposition to the inventory he loves. Who cares if what the film itself is promoting is performed out?

Dumb Money
Rated R. Risky investments. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters.