In late 2020 and January 2021, a motley collection of small-time investors, loosely led by a nerdy YouTuber and Reddit poster who went by the name of Roaring Kitty, delivered an emphatic poke in the eye to the Wall Street elite. A flood of money and a feeding frenzy on the stock of GameStop (a struggling chain of US video game stores) inflated the share value, with brutal consequences for several multibillion-dollar hedge funds. It was billed as a bite back against the cynical practice of short-selling (essentially when a trader bets on the decline of a business) and as an event that heralded the democratisation of the stock market, hitherto a heavily fortified industry controlled by the ultra-wealthy and ultra-privileged.
Now, director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) tackles the subject with a vigorous, ripped-from-the-headlines docufiction starring an affable Paul Dano as Keith Gill, AKA Roaring Kitty. There’s a lively bustle to Dumb Money, which successfully corrals a host of disparate supporting characters and parallel story strands. But this is exactly the kind of movie that you would expect from Hollywood, itself a heavily fortified industry controlled by the ultra-wealthy and ultra-privileged. It’s a triumph-of-the-underdog narrative that offers a gloss of rabble-rousing appeasement but which conveniently breezes past the fact that there has been little in the way of real and lasting change. The haves still have; the have-nots cling to a taste of what might have been.
