Dumb Money

➤Rated R
➤Theaters
➤S5 / V2 / L10*

The GameStop stock phenomenon of January 2021 grabbed headlines across America. A group of individual investors formed a bloc and sent the price of a somewhat dubious investment sky-high. The frenzy derailed trading platforms and toppled investment giants. In Dumb Money, director Craig Gillespie attempts to capture the spirit of this intersection of culture and economics.

The story begins when Keith Gill (Paul Dano) starts investing in GameStop because he thinks the company is undervalued.

Conventional wisdom suggested the video-game retailer was headed for trouble as sales increasingly moved online. Hedge funds short the stock, betting the price will collapse, but Gill thinks Wall Street is wrong. He shares his views on the WallStreetBets Reddit forum and starts making YouTube videos about his investments, convincing other investors to join him.

The movie depicts this grassroots movement in three parallel story arcs that follow Gill’s converts, most of whom believe the system has left them behind.

As more investors jump on the bandwagon, the stock price skyrockets, causing those hedge funds to lose billions of dollars. But just as the individual investors appear to have won, WallStreetBets gets suspended, and trading apps freeze their ability to buy more GameStop. The movie’s message: The game is rigged to keep the little guy from getting ahead.

Dumb Money is one of the least family-friendly movies of 2023. It revels in vulgarity, and the film contains scenes of drug use and sexually suggestive situations. The movie accurately captures the toxicity of America’s online culture—if anything, it softens the profanity of the WallStreetBets forum—but it does a poor job of explaining the GameStop moment.

The Big Short (2015) managed to make the intricacies of the housing crisis both understandable and entertaining. Dumb Money never explains the mechanism behind a short sale or why the short squeeze proved so disastrous for institutional investors. It hints at a nefarious conspiracy behind Robinhood’s decision to halt GameStop trading on Jan. 28. Explaining the antiquated rules that govern the market’s clearinghouses wouldn’t fit the movie’s narrative of class warfare.

Perhaps the worst thing about Dumb Money is that it lies about how the average American can build wealth. Most people should regularly contribute to boring low-cost index funds, but Dumb Money suggests if individual investors stood up to Wall Street, we all could become millionaires with a lucky stock pick. To paraphrase Karl Marx, “Individual investors of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

*Ratings from kids-in-mind.com, with quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high