‘Dumb Money’ Review: In Craig Gillespie’s Brashly Entertaining Finance Saga, Paul Dano Plays the Nerd Who Led the GameStop ‘Revolution’
09.09.2023 - 04:55
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A lot of the young men who became stock traders in the 1980s saw themselves as rebels. With their Porsches and drugs and (by the decade’s end) their idolization of Gordon Gekko, they put the kill into making a killing. They were the new swingers of greed.
Of course, they weren’t really rebels, but it felt good for them to think of themselves that way. Keith Gill (Paul Dano), the central figure in Craig Gillespie’s smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama “Dumb Money,” is an amateur stock trader, and he also sees himself as a rebel. Keith, unlike the Wall Street players, actually is trying to fight the system.
But he may be nearly as caught up in illusions as they are. The Wall Street badasses of the ’80s wanted to be cool. Keith, by contrast, is a long-haired Middle American nerd who lives in Brockton, MA, with his wife (Shailene Woodley) and infant daughter and works for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.
In his spare time, he posts freewheeling video rambles on wallstreetbets, a chat division of Reddit. Calling himself Roaring Kitty, he broadcasts out of his basement while nursing a beer, wearing a shirt bedecked with gaudy cat photos and a mock-samurai bandana wrapped around his forehead. Against a projected backdrop of his financial portfolio, he jabbers on about his stock-market obsession — his fervent belief in GameStop, the brick-and-mortar video-game outlet he grew up with.
Sounding like Jim Cramer crossed with a grunge version of Christian Slater in “Pump Up the Volume,” Keith looks like a loser hooked on a deranged obsession. But in the world of stock tips, he’s got so much belief that he has amassed a small following. He’s invested
.