If Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money reminds you of David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), there are a few good reasons for it. Apart from Will Bates’ electro-synth score (reminiscent of Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ Oscar-winning score in Fincher’s film,) and principal characters staring at computer screens for a large part of its 107-minute runtime, Dumb Money is based on Ben Mezrich’s The Antisocial Network (2021). It’s the same author whose The Accidental Billionaires (2009) served as the source material for the Fincher-Sorkin classic. Another probably inconsequential detail is that the 2023 film’s executive producers are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – who, some might label as the ‘antagonists’ from Mezrich’s 2009 book. This is where the similarities end though.

Gillespie’s film – charting the ‘GameStop saga’ from late 2020 to early 2021, at the height of the pandemic in America – is closer to Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2016) and Gillespie’s own I, Tonya (2017) in tone. It has light feet, a colourful soundtrack, a frothy narrative, and an eye-popping ensemble – telling us about a rare time when Wall Street’s own severely compromised system was weaponised against them by some rag-tag individuals.

A hysterical headline describes the saga as the “French Revolution of the stock market” – it’s exactly the kind of hyperbole that cuts through the social media noise these days. How do you mean a billion-dollar hedge fund had to shut shop because of a movement fuelled by gifs and memes?

Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is, for all intents and purposes, what we can call ‘a work-in-progress’ (a polite word for a ‘loser’). He began his career as stock market analyst in the aftermath of the 2008 stock market crash, and since then, hasn’t been able to hold on to anything steady. After several short stints in major investment banks, Gill is now in a modest job, and he likes to fill his time doling out advice for amateur investors through a YouTube livestream. He hosts these streams on a Reddit thread called r/WallStreetBets, under the username RoaringKitty.

It’s on these Vlogs that Gill mentions being bullish on a stock called GameStop – a company that makes gaming equipment. Meanwhile, Melvin Capital, a Wall Street hedge fund owned by Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), is bracing itself to downsize the company – given its stagnant revenue, and the lack of promise or an upward movement, according to Wall Street. Gill puts all his life’s savings into the stock (~$50,000). As some people start to listen to him, the value of the stock begins to rise and word spreads around that buying GameStop might yield good returns in the short term – encouraging people to buy more of the stock. At this stage, the value of the stock starts to increase and the more this happens, the more Wall Street hedge funds stand to lose, because of their obligation to cover their short positions on the stock.

What starts off as one man’s hunch about a stock, slowly becomes a movement on social media against the top 0.1%. The retail investors, dubbed “Dumb Money” by market players for being at the mercy of their manipulations, can be seen hunting down the so-called lions. It’s a glorious once-in-a-lifetime event, when the stars align in a manner allowing justice to prevail.

Dumb Money features cosy, efficient performances especially by Paul Dano as Keith Gill, who nails the dorky ‘influencer’ type, who wears cat t-shirts and a red bandana on his streams. But he’s also a real person who seems to know some of the things he’s talking about. Dano’s performance is a delicate dance – tipping one way or another, it could have either ended up looking like a caricature or sucked all the fun out of the character.

Dano is surrounded by an excellent cast including Shailene Woodley, Anthony Ramos, America Ferrera, Pete Davidson, Sebastian Stan, Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dane De Haan and Nick Offerman. Except Dano, none of the other characters are well-defined, but it never becomes burdensome to watch them turn in effortless performances.

As the value of the stock rises – and Gill’s $50,000-dollar investment balloons into $50 million, that is when the conflict arises.

The moment the buyers sell the stocks, the hedge funds stop bleeding losses. Multiple characters – all denoted on the screen in Wall Street lingo by their “net worth” – wrestle with whether they should sell. These include underpaid nurses – who haven’t been able to afford a dentist’s appointment for their children – college students with thousands of dollars in debt, and people like Gill, who have undergone a lifetime of a grind just to have a shot at a silver lining like this.

Wall Street lobbies pull around their weight to break this Internet movement, by shutting down the message board where Gill used to communicate with his followers, as well as manipulating the application (called Robinhood) used by the retail investors to buy the GameStop stock – leading to an air of distrust.

Gillespie’s film doesn’t wade too deep into the well-known systemic rot of Wall Street, keeping the film as accessible as possible. So, on one level while the film remains immensely watchable, it also never really addresses how this was a black swan event – unlikely to ever be repeated in the next few decades at least. So improbable are these chain of events that in retrospect it makes it almost seem like a miracle that it happened at all.

Dumb Money doesn’t want to educate. It wants to reflect on a rare moment when people came together in the first world, on a platform (the Internet) that isn’t even taken seriously by most, to effect some real-world change. I wonder what those who invented the Internet – a place initially for introverts to whisper their theories about the world on anonymous message boards, suddenly taken over by extroverts thanks to social media – have to say about this event shaking up the status-quo?

It’s damning evidence that when sincere, like-minded people come together, they can take down the most ruthless, oppressive systems. Anyone can be a hero – even someone populating his streams with enough cat gifs and memes. It’s the kind of hope we need in times like these.

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