‘Dumb Money’ Is Missing a Pitchfork

At the end of Frank Capra’s 1941 drama, Meet John Doe—about a houseless man named John Willoughby who gets hired to impersonate a fictional grassroots social activist dreamed up on deadline by a desperate newspaper columnist—a throng of everyday Americans is confronted with the revelation that its everyman idol is a fraud. At first, the members of the so-called John Doe Club are furious to discover that Gary Cooper’s anti-capitalist firebrand is a fake: They feel betrayed and call for his head. But when Willoughby threatens to jump off the roof of city hall for his sins, the mob pauses. One by one, its members step forward, in ardent close-up, to recant their anger. They explain that even if “John Doe” isn’t real, the man embodying his values is worth saving; he’s still their hero after all. “There you are,” exclaims the editor who helped hatch the whole scheme as Cooper walks away beneath the chiming of Christmas bells. “The people! You can’t lick that.”

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More than any other American director’s movies of the mid-20th century, Capra’s films gave the impression of being of the people and for the people—the cinematic equivalent of the Constitution. His films were modern fables pitting ordinary folks against the unscrupulous plutocrats fixing to rob them blind; in order to level the playing field, Capra conjured up humble but forceful interlocutors who could speak on behalf of the community. These protagonists were salt-of-the-earth types given stature by alpha-male movie stars like Cooper (who also played the title character in 1936’s rousing Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) and Jimmy Stewart, whose climactic filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is arguably Capra’s signature sequence: a decent man on the verge of collapse, clinging to the truths he holds to be self-evident. When Stewart’s face fills the screen, it’s like we’re suddenly looking at Mount Rushmore. Given his populist bona fides, it’s no wonder the U.S. military enlisted Capra in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor to produce a series of morale-boosting short movies designed to ask and answer the question of why the country’s young men should go to war; his genius lay in making viewers feel like they were a part of something bigger.

In the 80 years since Meet John Doe, Capra’s name has become shorthand for inspirational melodrama. He’s often been imitated—most notably by the Coen brothers in The Hudsucker Proxy—but never duplicated, partly because he was peerless at what he did and partly because the ensuing decades of social and political upheaval showed the flaws in his wide-eyed optimism, or else recontextualized it as a form of reactionary status-quo conservatism. (A recent essay in the American Thinker even suggests that Donald Trump is the real John Doe.)

Enter Craig Gillespie’s new comedy, Dumb Money, a contemporary morality play featuring its own John Doe figure: DeepFuckingValue, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty, a.k.a. Keith Gill, a self-styled financial guru who briefly—and indelibly—became the bandanna-clad face of millennial rebellion and a pariah to the Wall Street establishment, whose foundations he helped shake (though not quite destroy) in January 2021. Freely adapted from the bestselling book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich—whose earlier tome about Facebook was the launching pad for David Fincher’s The Social Network—the film recounts the events of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, in which a group of powerful hedge-fund barons was humbled by armies of online investors rallying around a rush of irreverent social media rhetoric. Like The Social Network, it’s essentially a Revenge of the Nerds story, albeit one set in the world made by Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies; that Dumb Money was executive-produced by the Winklevoss twins is quite the stranger-than-fiction stroke.

Where Capra romanticized the idea of “the little guy,” Dumb Money weaponizes it, portraying Gill—played by Paul Dano—as an unassuming but lethal culture warrior. In a sea of ranting cable-network characters like Jim Cramer, the soft-spoken securities broker managed to capture and hold the ever-shifting attention of Reddit, where he slowly built his brand as a folk hero. His secret weapon was a laissez-faire attitude that lent itself to the basic philosophy of shitposting; “I just like the stock,” he repeated, over and over again, a mantra privileging individualism over groupthink. Gill’s ground zero was the chat-based page r/wallstreetbets, where he transformed himself into a sort of flesh-and-blood meme—the symbol of an American daydream set far from the Manhattan trenches. His slacker act wasn’t just endearing; it was a gentle rebuke to every pent-up, dressed-up wolf-of-Wall-Street wannabe toiling away in some cubicle on behalf of some corporate overlord.

Gill was also quite literally putting his money where his mic was, investing his life savings of $50,000—a number easily viewable online via stock-market apps—while maintaining his day job (and caring for a newborn). As GameStop’s stock price soared, Gill’s virtual net worth shot speedily from six to seven to eight figures, making Roaring Kitty something akin to Schrödinger’s cat: a hypothetical millionaire, but also a hypothetical loser if he held on too long. His commitment to his position—and to what could be construed as some Deep Fucking Values—inspired his viewership to similarly hold their ground. If their man wouldn’t take the money and run, they reasoned, why should they? Meanwhile, the hedge-fund titans who’d tried to short sell GameStop began hemorrhaging billions of dollars; the fact that the “dumb money” eating away at their fortune came from a stock-market app called Robinhood was a delicious, irresistible touch.

After spending his career getting the shit kicked out of him by more commanding costars in movies like There Will Be Blood and Prisoners, Dano has an inveterate underdog quality that he’s able to modulate in interesting directions, and he’s perfectly cast in Dumb Money; he gives the character a slightly doughy exterior that belies his ramrod sense of principle. If he’s not quite as commanding as Cooper or Stewart, that speaks more to changing (and diminished) ideas of American heroism than any real fault in the performance. Crucially, Keith doesn’t seem driven by any overt animus; rather, the script, by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, postulates that his support of GameStop is rooted in a slightly wonky nostalgia for brick-and-mortar businesses—an affectionate, melancholy sensation that the film exploits in terms of both its internet-driven narrative and COVID-era setting, which combine to suggest a world in flux. It’s probably Dumb Money’s subtlest point that it was the stir-craziness of the pandemic, more than anything else, that inspired so many people to play the market in the first place and that the ensuing sense of liberation as the numbers started rising gave users the equivalent of an out-of-body experience.

The question of how far in the past a movie needs to be set to qualify as a period piece is worth asking, and it’s to Gillespie’s credit that Dumb Money feels of a piece with 2021. Its digressions into extremely online montages of various memes and message-board iconography could have been taken directly from Don’t Look Up, itself a putative Capra homage that flipped the script by having its hero’s righteous rhetoric fail in the face of an impending apocalypse. More generally, Gillespie has ingested—if not mastered—the lessons of Adam McKay dating back to The Big Short about how to make complex financial-world concepts accessible in a mainstream studio comedy. But here’s the thing: Whatever its flaws, The Big Short bristled with ambivalence, about both its characters—who lined their wallets from the bailout without doing much for the larger population whose assets were being decimated—and its own audience. Even as the much-touted scene where Margot Robbie discoursed on subprime mortgages while lounging in a bubble bath demystified certain verbiage, it also implied—none too kindly—that we’re collectively incapable of understanding basic concepts about money without some combination of sex, celebrity, and direct address.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. Like all truly worthwhile satire, The Big Short was ultimately harder to pin down than it may have seemed. Dumb Money isn’t nearly as slippery, partly because Gillespie isn’t as adroit a director as his predecessor and partly because it doesn’t really have a handle on the sheer Reddit-ness of it all, selectively sanitizing the rhetoric around the GameStop uprising so that we never lose our bearings—or our sympathies. In this way, Dumb Money hews a little too close to Capra and his Manichaean dramaturgy. The amateurs following Keith’s lead are composite characters depicted in unfailingly noble, humane terms: a cash-strapped nurse (America Ferrera), a politically progressive college couple (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder), a goofy GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos). Their decency while chasing profits suggests a middling flip of Gordon Gekko’s mantra: “Greed isn’t bad.” Meanwhile, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, and Vincent D’Onofrio never elevate their real-life roles beyond scheming caricature. (They wouldn’t warrant five minutes of screen time in The Wolf of Wall Street.)

It’s also tough to get too caught up in proletarian, anti-corporate righteousness when we see real-life footage of David Portnoy and, um, Elon Musk defending Gill online—scenes that a more complex movie would use to interrogate the thorny relationship between principled resistance and trolling. Perhaps mindful of this fact, the filmmakers cram as much video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s grilling of the bad guys during a congressional investigation into the GameStop affair as possible.

The fact that Gill ended up being subpoenaed and testifying (via Zoom) about his role in the whole affair gives Gillespie rich material to work with—a big, Capra-esque climax where the hero can address his faithful with words of wisdom. The scene works, both because Gill’s speech on behalf of a fairer, less impenetrable stock market was pretty good and because Dano has the role’s mannerisms down cold. And yet what’s really being asserted isn’t all that inspiring. The idea that Gill’s followers all ultimately managed to make some money in the end doesn’t exactly scream “tear the system down,” while the closing credits’ assertion that Wall Street now acknowledges Reddit’s power merely suggests the rich figured out new ways to get richer: a reading compounded by the fact that in the end, the film’s bad guys barely got dinged. It’d be one thing if Gillespie tried to inject a certain irony into the proceedings, to note that a slap on the wrist isn’t quite a happy ending or that it isn’t quite a revolution for one group of loyal disciples to cash in while the rich continue getting richer—with impunity and government protection. Instead, he tries to go full Capra and ends up with something weirdly self-divided: a movie that’s somehow effective and untrustworthy at the same time. It wants us to believe that the lesson of GameStop is that you’ll never lick the people, but it’s closer to something far more sinister and contingent: The house doesn’t always win, but it’ll always remain standing.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.