Dumb Money – Review

Release Date – 22nd September 2023, Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 44 minutes, Director – Craig Gillespie

A YouTube streamer (Paul Dano) leads a fight against Wall Street hedge fund owners by causing a wave of investments in GameStop

Reddit taking on Wall Street could make for a very unserious film. The stereotype might be a series of internet-related jokes with quickly dated meme references. While certainly a couple of such references crop up in quickly flashing by montages of comments, GIFs and slang it’s simply to show how quickly the success of the platform investing in GameStop stocks takes off, and how far it maintains. As Paul Dano states when addressing congress late into the film, as Keith Gill rather than his YouTube stream persona Roaring Kitty, it seems there’s no hope for the little guy anymore when it comes to the stock market with it having being taken over and controlled by millionaires and billionaires.

Gill leads the charge against such figures, the hedge fund owners betting against GameStop being played by Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman and Vincent D’Onofrio. Alongside them we see the perspectives of everyday people who’s fortunes rise after following the rising YouTubers analysis. America Ferrera plays hospital worker Jenny, Anthony Ramos is GameStop employee Marcus, Talia Ryder and Myha’la Herrold are college students Riri and Harmony. There’s a number of people to cut back and forth from during the not-quite-montage nature of a number of sequences. It means that a number of characters feel present more for perspective and to show more impact rather than to properly be characters – yet even then some do more than Keith’s wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley), who is barely present throughout the film.

Dumb Money is an undeniably busy piece of work covering a lot of perspectives in rather bizarre set of, very recent, circumstances. Keith is undeniably the most interesting figure here and Dano provides a reliable performance with plenty to like. He’s the reason we connect with the story and follow most of the other perspectives in the first place, he’s certainly the one everyone else seems to be following.

While a serious film there is still room for comedy. The first half may miss much of it, yet as we enter the second half and the battle with Wall Street properly takes off, and their responses come in, the humour becomes more present. Not every attempt lands, but there are still a handful of chuckles here and there to help things pass along, particularly as the film still covers multiple characters without always getting across the effect that it might want. There’s still an interesting film at hand, particularly when it verbalises its themes and ideas in the second half, from both Gill and the smugly confident hedge funders working against him and the everyday people investing in stocks. When doing this Dumb Money speaks with confidence, and a hint of passion, it just doesn’t always carry through into the other perspectives we see throughout.

While interesting and effectively serious, with an occasional hint of playfulness, Dumb Money feels slightly over-busy with the characters it cuts back and forth between, Paul Dano makes for a reliable core, but not everything around him is as emotionally effective.