Focused on one wild corner of the internet that took center stage in 2021, we’re shown how millions of investors pushed back against Wall Street: by putting all their chips on GameStop. Commander Shipp is here to help you catch up on all the context and investment terms needed to understand and appreciate this wild, yet true, story.
Dumb Money
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Starring Paul Dano, Shailene Woodley, Seth Rogen, America Ferrera, and Pete Davidson
Runtime: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Synopsis
Based on the true story of how Reddit member Keith Gill (Paul Dano) – more affectionately known as RoaringKitty by his fans – uses his investing video streams to show why he believes in the potential of the GameStop stock, despite the company seemingly be on the verge of closure. After several hedge fund managers join in to short (A.K.A. bet against this happening – explained more fully later in this review) the strategy, many members in the community see it as an opportunity to not only gain money, but stick it to Wall Street for their greed and various transgressions.
First Off: What Is Dumb Money?
Investopedia describes the distinction between dumb and smart money as a difference in access: individual investors typically don’t have the same access or time to dedicate to trading platforms, don’t have teams of analysts, and often make their sell/buy decisions on gut feelings – whereas brokers and managers tend to avoid those pitfalls due to their status and resources. While the writers at Investopedia note it’s not meant to be used as signal of intelligence or to put down other investors, dumb money is routinely used like that in the movie and through my own anecdotal evidence, have witnessed a similar level of disdain from analysts when they talk about it.
Now, What Is A Short Squeeze?
To short a stock is to be against it – or placing money that bets the stock will go down. Investopedia notes that Short Squeezes occur when a stock price rises due to investors pumping the stock price up, with plenty of action on the other side (people shorting the stock). When the stock reaches its highest point and/or people don’t believe in the stock anymore, they will typically sell, which hurts the company and investors, but benefits the people shorting the stock.
Real-Life Robin Hoods
In addition to Dano as Keith Gill / RoaringKitty, this depiction makes sure to also show the lives of average Americans who follow Gill’s streams for stock market advice. This includes: Jenny (America Ferrera) who is a nurse struggling to support her children as a single mother; two college sweethearts, Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold), who are trying to navigate funds for their student loans; and Marcos (Anthony Ramos) who works for a mall GameStop and is frustrated with being considered an essential worker who has to upsell customers while COVID lockdown is till ongoing.
Trading is accessible to all of these Millennial and Gen Z individuals spread out across the USA mainly due to Robinhood: a commission-free stock trading site and app created by entrepreneurs Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota) and Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) in 2013. In real life, Bhatt spoke in 2018 about how the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in 2011 were the direct inspiration for trying to find a solution to the issues of Wall Street having a monopoly on stocks. Apparently that inspiration stopped short once big money came into play, as Robinhood actively harmed the GameStop traders to the benefit of the hedge funds shorting the stock. This is depicted in the film as Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), owner of hedge fund Citadel LLC, gets in Tenev’s ear to do something about the stock’s increasing value, leading Tenev to disable the button in the app and effectively suspend all trades. We shouldn’t be surprised by this apparent hypocrisy, though. There was plenty of confusion about OWS and who / what it represented, so it would be worth a quick recap to explain what happened.
Context is Everything: Housing Crisis, Occupy Wall Street, COVID, and Internet Memes
To understand both the genesis of this particular stock phenomenon and why so many investors in this Reddit community held onto their investment position for as long as they did, we have to consider the context going back to 2008:
2008-2010 Housing Crisis Market Crash
Many members of this particular Reddit community ranged from middle school to college-aged when the housing market crashed. Due to this, they saw first-hand how Wall Street got away with massive fraud, financial negligence, and then were bailed out. Meanwhile, millions of Americans saw their life savings wiped out, a majority of up and coming workers to the workforce found themselves unable to find jobs, and student loans started to pile up for many who were promised that student debt was a guarantee for employment. In pop culture, movies like The Big Short (2015) and Margin Call (2011) would help the public grasp how extensive the financial negligence was and make it easier to understand and discuss.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
Next, the Occupy movement – kickstarted in New York then spread around the country – laid a blueprint for how anger could be displayed against financial giants. However, one of the primary criticisms of this movement, was the lack of direction. As reporters interviewed demonstrators in Zuccotti Park back in 2011, some had concrete goals for how to address the income inequality and rampant financial corruption, but many didn’t. Various talking heads and outlets would use this to paint a narrative of ineptitude; the truth is likely in the middle, but the damage was already done. The movement fizzled without clear goals and directives while also failing to unify across racial and other ideological lines.
COVID
Fast-forward barely 10 years, as COVID spread across the country, it became harder to ignore the wage gap as the wealthy could choose to stay at home due to their immense wealth, while many were forced back to work out of desperation and dwindling finances. There have also been studies showing how COVID has affected the workforce, making employees grapple with death in such a tangible way and forever altering the value proposition of how they spend time at work. Adding to the fire, CEO and middle managers clung onto their mediocre to toxic workplace cultures, exposing how out-of-touch and unnecessary such management roles and attitudes are while also bolstering how successful remote work had become. It is in this heightened setting that Money played out in the real world.
Internet Memes (or “doing it for the LULZ”)
It can’t be understated how much fun people had by collectively tossing some money to majorly screw over hedge fund companies. With all the anger of being burned by banks and hedge funds, people had plenty of reason to hold out and hurt the funds shorting the stock. Trading apps like Robinhood made it easier, regardless of income level, to put a few hundred dollars into supporting the stock rise. Others with means to put in more and / or were finally making more money after the 2008-2010 recession, possibly even using their stimulus checks or COVID unemployment, felt they had nothing lose after COVID – especially after a decade of already having nothing.
Power To The Traders
It’s under this backdrop that writer Ben Mezrich chronicled the interactions between hedge fund managers and reddit investors in his 2021 book The Antisocial Network, becoming the basis for director Craig Gillespie and screenwriters Rebecca Angelo and Laura Schuker Blum’s adaptation. Paul Dano’s role as Keith Gill / RoaringKitty underpins the entire story and as we learn more about him, his wife and family – his earnestness as embodied by Dano – you can’t help but root for him to win out against the powerful brokers and hedge fund managers that want to leverage their power.
Flanking Dano – but never directly interacting with him – are Ferrera’s Jenny and Ramos’ Macros, representing different fans of Gill’s YouTube channel who stuck with his investment strategy. Their stories help bolster this modern day David vs. Goliath narrative – while pointing back to the historical issues laid out above. Their moments are short and brief, much like the two college students Riri and Harmony (Herrold and Ryder) who we see making their first steps towards investing. It’s through these amateur traders’ collective eyes, however, that we come to understand how the stakes impact more than just Gill. They each have their own financial woes – with plenty of personal reasons to cut their losses and run with whatever profit they squeaked out – but the audience is given compelling reasons for why these strangers want to stay and commit. I didn’t want to directly compare Dumb Money to the Big Short at every turn, but these multiple stories and insights help it feel cohesive across the United States, not simply an experience that Gill alone is facing.
For our antagonists, while they aren’t depicted as cartoonish-ly as a Scrooge McDuck, when you think about what they actually did…maybe they should have been.
Melvin Capital, led by Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), along with individual investors Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) represent the Wall Street part of the equation that’s attempting to short the GameStop stock. Whether it’s Cohen having a literally pig walk around his house or Plotkin attempting to secure another decadent mansion, the screenplay avoids making them into caricatures by simply showing us how they spend their time, what they are focused on with their money, and how aggressively they go after it. These moments are effective at conveying how banal their actions actually are, particularly because they aren’t mustache twirling train robbers. In reality, they represent that one uncle Jerry wearing New Balances and sporting a cardigan while wielding billions in capital to direct how they please – crushing people and businesses with a phone call. I personally find that to be more frightening than any Marvel villain that’s come out the past few years.
Gillespie does a great job balancing these threads into a narrative that audiences can easily follow – which is paramount when we’re talking about financial instruments and policy. Even if you’re not keenly aware of how this situation developed, you can walk away from Money having a solid grasp of how shorting a stock works, why it became such a contentious debate between large swaths of the internet, and the dangers involved if powerful people are allowed to exert that much control without any checks and balances. Compared to the earlier 2023 film Air‘s rosy outlook on how capitalism benefits society (more like one person and one company in particular, if we’re being honest), Money is a much-needed breath of sober realism. It’s also a surprisingly fun and short trip since the multiple characters and their own life situations keeps the energy moving, with various cameos or short comedic roles (like Gill’s brother played by Pete Davidson), or the well-timed jokes or reference back to the Reddit / YouTube stream culture that sparked this issue. While Money doesn’t dive too deep into those facets, their presence is usually the levity we need at any given moment, keeping a potentially depressing issue from becoming unbearable.
Conclusion / Recommendation
If you need a quick introduction into the world of financial-based cinema that won’t put you to sleep or make you pine for the pinstripe suits of Gordon Gecko, Dumb Money delivers that with a compelling adaptation of real-life investors and families going toe-to-toe without resorting to cheap caricatures or distorting the well-documented history of the GameStop short.
As of this writing, Dumb Money releases on Netflix on January 20th, 2024 and is a perfect release to enjoy on streaming, and would pair well with other films mentioned, like The Big Short or Margin Call.
Score: 8 out of 10
A Brief Aside About Working at GameStop
Similar to Anthony Ramos’ character Marcos, I previously worked for GameStop’s competitor EB Games (I am definitely showing my age quite a bit here) and remember when they bought our company and that whole change over process, converting our store over to a GameStop. In those days, I rather liked the company and enjoyed my time working there, avoiding the dreaded upsell and quotas that have become the bane of many employees existence there today – I’m not saying we didn’t do that at EB, it just wasn’t as intense. While I certainly appreciate and resonate with the little guy trying to get over on hedge managers, I found GameStop being the rallying cry to be completely hilarious given their problematic company history, especially when it comes to how they handle their games (video collectors will be in 100% agreement in the comment section) and employee relationships.
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