It seems the turnaround time for films that are “based on a true story” is forever shrinking. Dumb Money, the director Craig Gillespie’s new movie about the GameStop-stock craze, chronicles events that took place in January 2021: a surprising boom in the brick-and-mortar video-game retailer’s stock value that eventually created a mini-crisis on Wall Street. The writer Ben Mezrich published an account of the story, The Antisocial Network, in September 2021; production on its film adaptation started a year later. This raises a question: How could they possibly create a period piece chronicling events that are so recent?

My fear was that Dumb Money would resemble a dramatized Wikipedia page, explaining the technical details of a news story that viewers can just Google themselves. That’s a subgenre popularized by hits like Adam McKay’s The Big Short, a retelling of the 2008 financial crisis that contained repeated jokey scenes of celebrities explaining economics jargon straight to camera, in case viewers couldn’t keep track. And Dumb Money is about an incredibly complex series of events—a short squeeze prompted by a sudden increase in retail investment that placed some hedge funds in deep peril. Fortunately, Dumb Money understands that viewers don’t really want to sweat the details.

Gillespie and his screenwriters, Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, somehow deliver a film steeped in the mood of early 2021. Less than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, lots of people were still locked down in their homes, many businesses were closed, and it felt like the most anyone could do was be glued to their cellphone. Dumb Money borrows from the portentous atmosphere of David Fincher’s The Social Network, another movie based on a Mezrich book that turned an insular tech tale into a parable of societal rot.

That’s not to say the movie isn’t fun—it’s a diverting, high-energy romp, packed with a charming ensemble and armed with an unsubtle disdain for the one percent. It spins the GameStop saga into a tale of plucky Davids taking on many a Goliath. The reality is, undoubtedly, more complicated, but Gillespie understands that his audience will remember the overall attitude of festering frustration from almost a year stuck at home. For multiple reasons, the stock value of a video-game retailer briefly became a rallying cry for amateur American entrepreneurship, and Dumb Money is a great time capsule of that collective bit of insanity.

The protagonist of the film is Keith Gill (played by Paul Dano), a stringy-haired, sweatband-wearing amateur investor who frequents a Reddit page called WallStreetBets, a message board filled with profane memes and shaky investment advice. Intrigued by Wall Street’s “short” position against GameStop, with major hedge funds betting that the company would go under because of pandemic pressures, Gill identifies the stock as undervalued instead. He encourages his followers on YouTube to buy it in defiance of the bigwigs. And he helps spearhead what becomes a financial sensation—at least, until the stock comes crashing back to Earth.

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The rest of Dumb Money’s ensemble are either investors from WallStreetBets or hedge funders reacting with increasing alarm to the situation. America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos, and Myha’la Herrold are among the buyers, all down-on-their-luck folks who get drawn into the online craze. Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Nick Offerman play the hedge-fund managers squabbling over the consequences. Gillespie even gets real comic value out of Pete Davidson as Gill’s ne’er-do-well younger brother with shaggy charm; the character is also the closest thing the movie has to an audience surrogate.

Almost all of Dumb Money plays out online; the screen repeatedly floods with images of memes, Reddit posts, and inane GIFs, the shared nonsense language of the poster. It correctly feels isolating—even the rich folks mill around empty mansions and resorts, barking stock buys into their phones in front of vacant swimming pools. But as the plot builds, Gillespie suggests how Gill’s GameStop fanaticism helped create a sense of community, however briefly, one united both by an American cowboy spirit and by a distrust of institutions. It feels like the network of investors is populated by actual pals, even though they never meet in real life.

The audience knows the cause is likely to dissolve quickly; this is less a get-rich-quick tale and more a peek into a unique, shared virtual folly. That’s why Dumb Money’s recency is so forgivable: Tales from yesterday’s internet bubble up so quickly, and vanish just as fast. Two years ago might as well be a lifetime.

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