'Dumb Money' Chronicles the Meme Stock Craze
by EG
The days when any old bro could make a fortune investing in GameStop, crypto, or NFTs are fading fast in the rearview mirror, but it's already time to look back on them, cinematically, with fondness. And if any actor seems perfect for the role of an investor who doesn't know what he's doing, it's The King of Staten Island star Pete Davidson. That makes the new finance movie Dumb Money look like a guaranteed winner. Read on for details.
Via Variety.
A lot of the young men who became stock traders in the 1980s saw themselves as rebels: the new swingers of greed. Of course, they weren’t really rebels. But it felt good to 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 who 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 pision of Reddit, and on YouTube. 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 $53,000 of his own money — his family’s savings — in GameStop. And it’s due to his conviction that something starts to happen.
“Dumb Money” is set during the first two months of 2021, when GameStop’s best days would seem to have been long behind it. It’s losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It’s a relic-in-the-making, like Blockbuster Video a generation before. The most powerful American hedge funds have spent years betting against GameStop, short selling the stock, making money off the promise of its failure. But Keith, with his flaky, shiny-eyed, so-out-there-it’s-in social-media presence, wins a handful of converts over to his mania. And against all odds, the stock starts to rise. Which just feeds the enthusiasm for it.
Of course, what’s really feeding the enthusiasm is the fact that the hedge funds are short selling it. Keith positions Gamestop as the “people’s” stock, the one that the greedheads didn’t want you to believe in. He turns buying the stock into an act of fighting back against a system that’s stacked against ordinary people. But once people start to buy the stock, all the short selling that’s gone on — the undervaluing — acts like oxygen feeding a fire. That’s what a short squeeze is: The stock takes off like a rocket. It was selling at $3.85, but within weeks it’s selling at $20, at $60, at $100, finally shooting up to $348. Everyone who invested in it, led by Keith, is a winner. Keith himself is soon worth $22 million.
But has perception become reality? Is GameStop, as a corporation, really worth more than it was? That’s the eternal question of the market, even as the GameStop phenomenon gets fueled into an armchair insurrection.
A commercial movie needs a hero, and “Dumb Money,” which is defter, more fun, and less labored than “The Big Short” (it doesn’t keep chewing on its exposition), has a shaggy hero, of sorts, in Keith, the basement stock analyst who, for a few months, kicked off a movement, democratizing the top-down world of stock trading. The film’s title is the phrase that Wall Street uses to look down its nose at inpidual investors. You might say that it’s a film made in their defense. And Paul Dano, playing Keith as a kind of quirky, saintly, dough-faced financial savant, wins you over to his cracked conviction.
Get the rest of the story at Variety.