Dumb Money Turns a GameStop Stock Explainer into Rousing Social Commentary

Ah, history’s great tech disruptors. Steve Jobs. Kevin Flynn. Roaring Kitty. Ok, that last one remains to be seen, but for now, there’s a more than good chance that Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money will make Roaring Kitty a household name—and have you cheering his machinations, which changed some of Wall Street’s nefarious ways.
Based on the true events around the GameStop short squeeze mania that inspired author Ben Mezrich’s 2021 book The Antisocial Network, Dumb Money focuses on the 2021 stock market hullabaloo instigated by the internet Pied Piper influencer, Keith Patrick Gill (Paul Dano). An average middle-class husband and father in Brockton, Massachusetts, Gill spent a lot of his free time either running at the local high school track, or in his basement researching potential stocks to invest his relatively small personal savings into. As an accounting nerd, he shared his findings publicly under the handles u/DeepFuckingValue on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on Twitter and YouTube. Things got interesting when he got fixated on the potential of GameStop stock mostly for how it was being ignored by stockbrokers and hedge funds. In 2020, he eventually bought $50,000 shares and built a community of like-minded, everyday followers who agreed with his methodology and his very simple ethos: “I like the stock.”
With the majority of humanity stuck inside due to various COVID restrictions in 2021, online communities burgeoned as every demographic looked to their phones and computers for community and a panacea for their boredom. For Gill, it was both an opportunity to prove his analyst skills for future jobs and to buy a house for his wife and baby. What it turned into was a David vs. Goliath game of brinksmanship as Roaring Kitty’s vlogs became hugely popular with retail stock and day traders looking for cheap investments with potential returns. When Wall Street got wind of it, the Melvin and Citadel Hedge funds bet that GameStop shares would fall, and a battle was born.
Most people’s stock market knowledge comes from what they read on their 401K statements and then they’re checked out, which means Dumb Money has the same issues that director Adam McKay faced with The Big Short (2015). That film had to explain to audiences how the 2007-2008 financial crisis caused the housing market bubble to burst, using a bunch of investor characters who needed to unpack it while not leaving us in immediate comas.
Using lessons learned from that hit, Gillespie’s Dumb Money is even more accessible than The Big Short because screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo broaden the circle of impact to include people from all walks of life. There’s in-the-trenches GameStop retail associate Marcus (Anthony Ramos) who actively suffers the company’s binder full of mandatory sales goals. Or the college girlfriends (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder) looking to tackle their loan debt, and maybe an anarchic cause. Arguably the most effective is America Ferrera’s single mom and frontline pandemic nurse, Jen Campbell. She’s in debt and isn’t going to get out of it with her day job. All of them provide human stories behind the internet-anonymous people who followed Roaring Kitty’s GameStop shares purchasing, humanizing the techy story and giving audiences four people to chart and rally around as the stakes get higher when the GameStop stocks go through the roof.