‘Dumb Money’ is a Sly Indictment of COVID-era Inequality

‘Dumb Money’ is a mostly-comic story about a group of online underdogs who thumbed their noses at Wall Street during one of the darkest periods in American history. Keith Gill (or “Roaring Kitty), who Paul Dano plays with a low-key wit, pretty much singlehandedly drove up the share price of Game Stop, a decaying retail company, in defiance of hedge funds that had shorted the company, assuming that its incompetent management and dated business model would soon put it out of business. And the irony was that the hedge-fund guys were right; Game Stop was heading into the crapper. But Gill “liked the stock”, and his good-natured insistence in not selling his shares led to an investing revolution.

DUMB MONEY ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Written by: Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Angelo, Ben Mezrich
Starring: Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson, Shailene Woodley, America Ferrara, Anthony Ramos, Nick Offerman, Vincent D’Onofrio
Running time: 105 mins

Director Craig Gillespie captures all that in Dumb Money, accompanied by a banging soundtrack. H manages to convey the TikTok-video and Reddit-post vibe of the “stonk” mania that Gill fueled. The movie feels modern and fresh. But the movie’s real topic hangs just below the surface.

The Game Stop stock drama played out entirely under the umbrella of the COVID pandemic, and Dumb Money is the first mainstream movie to show how sad and unfair life really was during COVID. Gillespie makes a lot of hay showing the lifestyle differences between regular people and the super-rich, but those exist even during normal times. But the pandemic truly exacerbated them. Seth Rogen plays a hedge-fund shorter who is trying to tear down a mansion adjacent to his in Miami so he can build a tennis complex for his family. Meanwhile, a nurse played by America Ferrara has to wear a mask everywhere she goes and has a desperate and sad encounter with a stranger at a gas station, where she’s so desperate to see someone else’s face that she flirts with him about his mediocre car.

A mall Game Stop employee, played by Anthony Ramos, is constantly trying to remove his mask while working behind six layers of Plexiglas, only to have his boss scold and upbraid him. Two University of Texas students, though they go maskless in the dorms, get lectures from their professors to mask up. Everywhere you look in the movie, the servers must wear masks, while those they serve, the wealthy, do whatever they want.

Keith Gill operates in a sort of middle gray-era. The only time you see him masked is when he’s riding a mostly-empty train in Boston. By day, he’s a work-from-home financial services guy, the kind of person who got through the pandemic with only minimal interruption. There’s some talk about him losing his sister, but a little research says that the real sister “died suddenly” in 2020, not necessarily from COVID, given that she was 43 years old. But regardless of Dumb Money’s fudging of his personal tragedy, Gill’s fans and clients were operating under the COVID world order.

At one point, Rogen and Nick Offerman, who plays a rapacious capitalist bastard, say that their job was to make money shutting down small businesses and companies who followed ridiculous government rules, trying to do the “right thing”. But the Masters of the Universe don’t care about doing the right thing, they just care about making a profit.

That’s what makes Dumb Money such a righteous, but never self-righteous, comedy. The script thinly sketches the side stories involving Ramos and Ferrara and the college students. It makes sense why they’re in place, but they kind of feel like editorials rather than storytelling; the movie isn’t long enough to justify the epic scope that Gillespie wants to give it. Instead, the emotional and comedic core of the movie is Gill’s relationship with his DoorDash-driving Masshole brother, played hilariously by Pete Davidson, who clearly doesn’t give a fuck about any of this, and gets a sweet ride as a reward.

The real heroes of the pandemic were the guys who dropped off French fries, invested in stonks, and jerked off to porn until the storm passed. And now, through Dumb Money, we can all laugh about one of the great underdog stories of the COVID era: How Roaring Kitty and his merry band of online investors made the assholes who were trying to destroy us sweat, if just for a minute.