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From its title alone, “Dumb Money” quite literally dumbs itself down for its audience — rather, it hopes to bring itself down to an understandable level. The opening text of the film explains that the derogatory phrase “dumb money” is used by Wall Street to refer to individual investors. In other words, the title refers to everyday people hoping to strike big while hedge fund CEOs continue to rake in billions.

Following a group of destitute yet ambitious investors from a Reddit page called WallStreetBets, the latest film from “Cruella” and “I, Tonya” director Craig Gillespie is a contrived story of the undervalued, transforming its convoluted GameStop stock craze subject matter into a David-versus-Goliath-esque tale of the little guy taking down massive conglomerates.

However, in carving a black-and-white story of revolution out of its source material (the nonfiction book “The Antisocial Network” by Ben Mezrich), “Dumb Money” is remarkably incurious about the motivations of its broadly written characters as well as the troublesome internet culture that spearheaded the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. It is untimely for such a lackluster biopic to be released after the year’s charismatic “Air” and extraordinary “Oppenheimer.”

Set amidst America’s transition back to normalcy from a year of quarantine, “Dumb Money” is centered around Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a 34-year-old husband and father known by his YouTube channel Roaring Kitty as well as the Reddit username DeepF*ckingValue. Gill, believing GameStop is an “undervalued” stock, posts spreadsheets of his significant investments in the company on WallStreetBets and discusses his predictions on YouTube live streams — often and bizarrely equating profits with chicken tenders. His enthusiasm inspires down-and-out individuals around the U.S. to take action.

From here, we are introduced to several peripheral characters including Jenny (America Ferrera), a nurse and single mother with massive credit card debt; undergraduates Riri (Myha’la Herrold) and Harmony (Talia Ryder) with significant student loans; and GameStop employee Marcos (Anthony Ramos), who works a tedious job with a contemptuous manager (Dane DeHaan).

These individuals are empowered by Gill’s live streams and Reddit posts to join the GameStop short squeeze, a rapid increase in the price of the company’s stock when mass amounts of investors started buying in. It was a smart decision to balance Gill’s story, often filled with complicated Wall Street terminology, with the journeys of working-class characters who have personal stakes in the stock craze.

The performances are the strongest aspect of the film, with each actor fully committed to selling the irreverent material they’ve been given. Dano particularly stands out in the type of role that feels tailor-made for him. Previously excelling as socially awkward characters in films like “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Swiss Army Man” and even “The Batman,” Dano has fun playing both the reserved in-person Gill and his outlandish online alter-ego RoaringKitty. It is quite charming to see how these starkly different personas interact with each other over the course of the film.

With so many characters, however, most of them come across as mere archetypes rather than people. Gillespie is not nearly as invested in the human core of the storytelling as he was in previous films, resulting in a far less cohesive end result.

The focused subject matter of “I, Tonya,” for instance, gives the film more leeway to develop its characters beyond the main plot, whereas “Dumb Money” must juggle an entire ensemble of personalities. There is a brief interlude in the former film where Tonya Harding describes her friendship with rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan over a scene of the two women drinking and eating junk food. This intimate moment humanizes the two celebrity figures to give further weight to the controversy around the attack on Kerrigan.

Such moments of character nuance are replaced in “Dumb Money” by broad melodrama with vague motivations. Gill undergoes little change across the film’s runtime. Before the film begins he already believes GameStop is undervalued, but his personal stake in the stock is reduced to a throwaway line about him and his brother Kevin (Pete Davidson) going to the store as kids.

We’re introduced to him in a scene of him running on the track, a place he frequently returns to in times of doubt. As much as he runs, he can never quite break his personal record – potentially a metaphor for addiction, though the film celebrates his resolve to continue investing and ultimately upholds the value of the stock market. Just as his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) is written to support his ridiculous investments with little pushback, so too are the side characters who deify Gill as a revolutionary.

The primary traits of Jenny, Riri, Harmony and Marcos are their occupations and financial insecurity. These are characters designed to be as likable as possible so that the audience can root for and relate to their situations.

In giving us such unquestionable heroes to root for, “Dumb Money” sidesteps the ugliness of the online communities that started the short squeeze. Problematic internet culture is reduced to a little quirk to be laughed at rather than a serious roadblock to the supposedly admirable tale of poor versus rich being depicted.

Gillespie frequently subjects the viewer to closeups on Reddit comments and memes without meaningfully engaging with the effects of harmful internet language; the film shrugs this off as “just how it is” online. A slur even flashes on the screen in bold during one of several repetitive montages featuring collages of TikToks and Reddit posts overlaid on each other. The stylization of this slur is detrimental to a film that wants to be accessible.

Unfortunately, these montages are among the only noteworthy visuals in the film, which is otherwise unremarkably shot and edited. “Dumb Money” attempts to draw a contrast between the lavishly vapid lifestyles of hedge fund CEOs with the lived-in struggles of the working class, yet the film is miserably lit whether we’re in clean, empty mansions or claustrophobic suburban households.

Gillespie gets far more visual mileage out of bringing to life human communications during the COVID-19 era. Just as Gill lives in online forums, hedge fund CEOs like Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogan) must prepare for Zoom and Skype interviews with news outlets. Still, not nearly as much depth is given to the functionality of these digital communications as Celine Song’s masterful “Past Lives,” which was released earlier this year.

By positioning itself as a clean-cut story of righteous underdogs revolting against buffoonish billionaires, “Dumb Money” severely limits its own ambitions and leaves too many underdeveloped threads.

Gillespie’s efforts to make this film as accessible and unchallenging as possible result in a film lacking in character specificity and cultural interrogation. It is ultimately less extensive and entertaining than a Wikipedia article on the same subject — which doesn’t cost $15 to read.

Published on September 26, 2023 at 9:04 pm