A movie about money can be a hard sell: do you really want to learn about economics at the cinema? And if it’s about the GameStop short squeeze, a complicated financial fiasco which took place only two years ago, during the wintry depths of an ongoing pandemic, you’d forgive audiences for saying “too much, too soon”. But director Craig Gillespie, whose new film, the comedy-drama Dumb Money, out on 22 September, is about exactly that, sees things a little differently. “Everything was profoundly affecting us – losing loved ones, financial hardships, a government that wasn’t helping. There was all this frustration and isolation, and willingness to connect socially, and all these things lined up and funnelled into GameStop,” he says over a video call from New York. “I was really excited to dive right into that.”
The film, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, follows the key players of a short squeeze – when a company’s shares rapidly increase because of high demand – that was carried out on the stock of American gaming retailer GameStop in 2021. It’s an informative and entertaining overview of events, in the vein of 2015’s The Big Short, which focuses on Keith Gill (played by Paul Dano), a Massachusetts-based financial analyst, who purchased GameStop stock (which he believed was undervalued) and provided details about his investment on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit. Dumb Money depicts him as a David-type figure who inspires Redditors to rise up against the financial establishment: the hedge fund managers betting on the retailer’s decline and consequently losing a lot of money are his Goliath. Gill is enigmatic, fighting against greed while making a lot of money himself, a knotty figure at the film’s centre.
Gillespie had direct experience of these events, and their impact. His 24-year-old son, at home during the pandemic, decided to invest in GameStop and Gillespie remembers seeing his stress levels skyrocket with the share price: “He is up at 6AM looking at what’s happening on the stock exchange, he’s watching the European markets in the evenings, constantly monitoring everything, and literally checking his phone every three minutes to decide when he is going to get out.” (It turns out Gillespie’s son got out at exactly the right time.)
That mania makes it into the film, which often plays like a thriller with punchlines. It also wisely introduces side characters based on interview subjects in Mezrich’s book, including ardent Gill superfans (America Ferrera plays an overworked, underpaid nurse hoping to make it big) and investment app Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev (Sebastian Stan), widely criticised for his involvement. Has Gillespie heard from anyone depicted in the film? “Sony has heard from Ken Griffin’s [a hedge fund CEO played by Nick Offerman] lawyers, but outside of that, nobody.” Once the film is out, that might change.
Gill, as played by Dano, has an inscrutable quality, though as the film progresses, and pressures mount from Wall Street, he has an admirable determination which verges on the heroic. “There’s a lot of humour in my work, but it’s never at the expense of the character,” says the Australian-American director, whose previous films include the Oscar-winning I, Tonya and Cruella. In this case, accurately portraying the central character was a challenge: Gill has all but disappeared, and though the filmmakers reached out, he did not reply. “That just put more weight on us to get it right.” There was Gill’s testimony to Congress (yes, the crisis required government intervention) and an interview with the Wall Street Journal, but not much else. Dano himself did his own research, according to Gillespie, trawling through Gill’s posts on Reddit. “He’s amazingly diligent that way,” the director notes.
But you are here for a movie, not an economics lesson. “It was an unusual process,” Gillespie says about the challenge of conveying financial terms and concepts on the big screen. Around a month into the edit, he gathered his two sons’ friends to show them the film: as they overlapped with the Reddit community, he figured they would be toughest to please. What he learnt was that there had been too much of an emphasis on actors explaining things in the early version. “It was too singular,” Gillespie says. “And it was such a collective effort online, with so many people explaining it in their own unique way.” Luckily there was an abundance of news clips and TikToks about the events. So they let the memes do the talking in the film, with propulsive montages that mix news and social media footage: it’s lucky that TikTokers (the good ones, anyway) have a knack of explaining concepts with concision and humour.
The film also explores the pandemic, another potential “too soon” moment for audiences (and one many films have bungled). “Covid is so integral to this story,” Gillespie says. “It was obviously, I think, the catalyst for why this was happening like this: the disenfranchised, the alienation.” Some actors, like Dane DeHaan who plays a GameStop store manager, are barely recognisable until they lower their masks. (Masks are also used to highlight the privileges of class: in the film, a driver might be wearing a mask, but the person being driven likely isn’t.) There are some fun, though equally visceral, reminders of that period, such as the film’s opening needle drop of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”: “Like getting a bucket of cold water thrown in your face out of the gate,” Gillespie says.
The GameStop short squeeze happened in 2021; this film is being released in 2023. I wonder what news event from this year might have caught Gillespie’s attention, a viral story turned genre-splicing movie we might see in cinemas in a couple of years’ time. Between missing submarines, presidential mugshots, the rise of ChatGPT, there has been no shortage of headline news that intersects with hot-button issues of the day. “I can think of one,” Gillespie says, with a nervous laugh. “But I don’t want to say because I may be doing it.”
‘Dumb Money’ is in cinemas 22 September
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
