Dumb Money Parent Guide

While Keith Gill (Paul Dano) has picked up a bit of an online following for his posts about his stock portfolio, he makes his living as a small-time investment manager. Everything changes when Keith stumbles into the stock that’s going to make him famous: Gamestock. The struggling brick-and-mortar video game outlet is being shorted by large hedge funds, but Keith thinks that the stock has more value than the market would otherwise indicate, and picks up as much of their stock as his life savings will get him – about $53,000 worth. When he starts posting about his analysis of GME (the stock call symbol for Gamestop) on Reddit, thousands of casual investors buy shares for themselves. As the stock price shoots up, Keith starts getting more attention, both on the internet and in real life. The hedge fund managers who shorted GME are suddenly aware that the longer this chaotic pool of amateur investors holds GME stock, and the higher that stock price goes, the more they’re going to lose– and the potential losses are in the billions of dollars.

I think there’s an undefined but tangible window in which real life stories need to age before they can be adapted into films. Make it too early, and people remember it too clearly to ignore all the little changes you make. Given that the GameStop short squeeze happened about two years ago, we’re still firmly in the underripe territory. It’s an interesting story and one worth telling, but maybe not now – and maybe not like this.

Timing issues aside, the movie struggles to focus on what’s interesting about the story. Lots of time is spent on secondary characters (who never meet each other or the protagonist, and who have negligible individual impact on events) and montages of Reddit memes, which are worth mentioning but don’t merit the amount of screentime they get. I want this story to be about the actual scams, the dirty details of how hedge funds and trading companies and the SEC are trying to tilt the tables against retail investors to benefit Wall Street. You know, like The Big Short did.

While the premise of the film presupposes minimal violence, it certainly compensates in profanity with well over 100 f-bombs sprinkled gleefully throughout the film. There’s also a fair amount of social drinking going on and occasional use of marijuana and tobacco products. Frankly, I’m surprised there isn’t more substance abuse. The stakes are high, the game is rigged, and the participants clearly want a way to escape from a stressful reality. As for you, entering this version of reality is your choice…