#TIFF23 Review: Dumb Money (Gala Presentations)

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

The phrase “Dumb Money” comes from how Wall Street fat cats refer to the money they make off poor investments by average folks who lose out in the long run. This makes it a fitting title for director Craig Gillespie’s entertaining dramatization of the recent GameStop saga, when regular people started buying stocks in the video game store to bid up the prices, finding a way to earn a profit against hedge fund managers who were trying to short the stock.

Adapted from the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich (whose The Accidental Billionaires provided the basis for The Social Network), Dumb Money does a fine job of summarizing this pretty recent history (things really started popping off in January 2021). Gillespie’s film works by leaning into being the story of the battle that unfolded when normie “apes” realized they could play these investors at their own game, using the profane Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets as their guidebook to share trading advice (often in the form of ironically offensive memes).

At the forefront of this community is Keith Gill (Paul Dano), aka Roaring Kitty, a financial analyst and amateur YouTuber in Brockton, Massechusetts whose prized investment is his shares in GameStop, the brick-and-mortar retail store hit hard by the pandemic. Supporting his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and their young daughter, Keith has a lot to lose. But, having long believed that the store’s stock is being undervalued, Keith senses a short squeeze and inspires his followers to buy.

What follows is a standoff between amateur investors and hedge fund managers like Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), who start to lose millions off of their bloated net worths, as Keith’s followers heed his calls to “hold the line” (“hodl” in memespeak) and not sell. This eventually led to congressional hearings, that entangled other figures such as Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), the entrepreneurial co-founders of investing app Robinhood.

The screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo drives home this David vs. Goliath narrative by showing the regular people making money off their GameStop investments. We follow college students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold); nurse and single mother Jennifer (America Ferrera); and GameStop employee Marcus (Anthony Ramos), who sees his investments as a way out of retail hell. The connecting thread between them is that they are all Roaring Kitty acolytes who obsessively watch Keith’s YouTube channel.

Even though many of them barely if ever interact with each other, the film touts a large ensemble cast, and if a few of the figures feel less developed (including Woodley’s), they all do a solid job of bringing this story to life. Dano grounds the film with his portrayal of an accidental internet messiah, while Pete Davidson provides levity as Keith’s brother Kevin, a chronic underachiever working as a food delivery driver. Davidson’s character also illustrates something key about this whole thing; this is primarily a proletariat revolution of working class people who want to be rich. They aren’t against the system so much as they want in.

The film is is very much steeped in the style of films like The Big Short, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Social Network, and while it’s destined to be seen as a slight cut below these aesthetic influences, Dumb Money is still sufficiently entertaining and well-acted enough to work on its own terms. If Gillespie’s film lacks somewhat of a greater political perspective, it does a good job of condensing this story into a fast-paced and consistently enjoyable 104 minutes.

Like in his previous film I, Tonya (and his streaming miniseries Pam & Tommy, another stylistic counterpart), Gillespie keeps Dumb Money moving at a quick clip, once again drawing ironic humour out of a somewhat messy true story. Editor Kirk Baxter cuts in memes and news clips, with onscreen graphics showing the rising and falling net worths of its central figures. The result is a film that is literate enough in the language of memes and internet shitposting to appeal to its core demographic, while also offering an informative enough crash course in investment speak to keep it watchable for neophytes.