From the Jacobins at Jacobin Magazine, September 28:
Director Craig Gillespie’s new film Dumb Money transforms the 2021 GameStop short squeeze into a rousing comedy about everyday Americans turning the tables against the financial elite. It’s the best “COVID movie” so far.
Director Craig Gillespie won my heart with I, Tonya, his scathing 2017 film about the quintessentially American life of skater Tonya Harding. In demonstrating how to redeem the degraded biopic genre, I, Tonya was so brilliant, I even forgave Gillespie for his subsequent film, the bloated Disney reboot Cruella (2021). He quickly rebounded, directing the first three episodes of the surprisingly insightful Hulu series Pam & Tommy (2022). He always does great work when he’s back on his turf — sharp satirical takes on the lives of working-class Americans who become celebrities, however minor, and however briefly, thereby getting a class-conscious range of grotesque cultural experience that’s eye-opening.
And now he’s back in top form once again with the endearingly funny biographical comedy drama Dumb Money, currently playing at a theater near you. The screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo was based on the 2021 nonfiction book by Ben Mezrich, The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees.
“Dumb money,” as the movie tells us in one of its explanatory title cards, is the scornful phrase used by big investment firm traders in describing “retail investors,” the regular individuals who risk their little savings on the stock market. The sneering contempt of the haves for the have-nots is the context for the movie, which is about how one adorkable real-life small trader named Keith Gill, working out of his basement during the COVID epidemic, defied the odds by investing and encouraging his online followers to invest in GameStop, a company “shorted” by hedge fund managers who expected the company to fail. Here’s what that means:
Basically, this means that an investor borrows the stock, sells it on the open market, waits for the price to fall, then buys it back at the lower price and pockets the difference after repaying interest on the initial loan (stock that they borrowed).
Paul Dano has never given a more appealing performance than this one, playing the nerdy longhaired Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty, his online handle in his YouTube videos, in which he wears assorted cat T-shirts along with a hilarious Rambo-style red headband that we see him ritually tie onto his forehead before logging on. Based on his own research, he’s decided that GameStop stock is actually undervalued, and he invests his little family’s entire savings.
Soon he becomes the unlikely David vs Goliath leader of an online movement, via YouTube and Reddit, that causes the GameStop stock to soar, eventually destabilizing the stock market and destroying at least one large investment firm. Gill’s plainspoken endorsement of GameStop, “I like the stock,” becomes a catchphrase that he uses with modest defiance later on when he’s forced to appear before Congress at the climactic point of the film to defend the role he played in the 2021 “short squeeze” that led to a Wall Street panic....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also the New York Post's "Billionaire Ken Griffin freaking out ahead of ‘Dumb Money’ movie"
