Dumb Money review: Spectacular cast delivers the goods in film about GameStop short squeeze

"I won't take investment advice from a guy in a cat shirt", a medical assistant says to a friend he believes is financially imprudent, in the rip-roaring Dumb Money. The implication being that someone shouldn’t take financial advice from people who don’t look like they know what they are talking about. It's a moment that pointedly captures the rotten essence of Wall Street money, and everything it projects for the gullible and the meek. We are fed the idea that people in suits and ties who brazenly parade their wealth, drop numbers and punch metaphorical holes into the walls of a casual conversation, know their greasy way around the economy. Their sense of authority doesn’t just exhibit knowledge, but also power. But sometimes, that elusive, casually dressed prudence can come from anywhere, including from places that men in suits condescend to or regard as culturally illiterate. Dumb Money is a rustling, heartfelt romp through a moment in American modern history that many refer to as the 'French Revolution of American Finance'. It may not exactly have changed things, but it does undeniably offer the thrill of something epochal and system-altering.

Paul Dano stars as Keith Gill, a small-time mutual fund employee who does a little trading, a lot of jogging and minor influencing as a side hustle. Gill, by the way, has a thing for cats and bandanas as well. Under the online names RoaringKitty and DeepFuckingValue, Gill makes hammy, amateur-looking videos where he shares his investment suggestions, portfolio hacks alongside his actual balance sheet. Gill, a Wall Street cynic, is a soft-spoken man of jangled nerves, who balances his stock obsessions with his duties as a loving husband and a committed father. In one scene he practically makes one of his squishy little tele-tubby-ish videos with his kid by his side. Disarmingly this is a dressing down of the image economic alacrity or corporate elitism are often framed through. There is an obvious reason we fall for it, and though this film won’t say it out loud, it’s a message subversively coded into the goofy tenderness of its protagonist.

Gill is bullish about the stock of GameStop, a videogames and computer accessories company that is down in the dumps, and suggests anything but a resurgence or redemption of sorts. It’s a dead bet to most experts. But deep in the company’s books, Gill believes, another story is brewing. When giant Wall Street hedge funds bet against GameStop, i.e., put their money behind the stock's decline, Gill and his sprawling coterie of followers from Reddit and YouTube, decide to huddle and collectively buy. It's called a 'Short Squeeze' but the nuances of it all are incidental to a story that breathes and expels a quietly revolutionary energy. Dumb Money isn't good because its on-point about the details of a fairly public episode (which it is) but because it does so through some terrifically witty writing, lifted by a sparkling cast at the peak of its powers.