Movie reviews: 'Dumb Money' is a rousing, high-energy, fist-in-the-air crowd pleaser

This week, pop culture critic Richard Crouse reviews new movies 'Dumb Money,' 'Expend4bles' and 'Stop Making Sense.'

Despite the title, “Dumb Money,” a new ripped-from-the-headlines dramedy starring Paul Dano, now playing in theatres, is a smart take on how an on-line investment blogger led the French Revolution of Wall Street.

Dano is Keith Gill. By day he’s a financial trader, at night he’s Roaring Kitty, host of a quirky on-line show broadcast from his Brockton, Massachusetts basement. Wearing tie-dyed cat t-shirts, topped with a red headband, he offers up stock advice for a tiny audience, who respond with torrents of abuse. In early 2021 he makes waves when he goes all in, sinking his life’s savings, into an unorthodox hunch.

“Yo! What up everybody,” he says on the show. “Roaring Kitty here. I’m going to pick a stock and talk about why I think it is interesting, and that stock is GameStop.”

Wall Street hedge funders had been short selling the video game retailer’s stock, hoping to profit if the stock fails, but Gill thinks the stock is undervalued, that there is life left in the company. His passion for the GameStop slowly wins over his handful of viewers, who snap up the cheap stock. As more and more people buy, the stock rises, and soon rockets to upwards of US$500 a share.

The ”retail traders,” the students and restaurant workers who take Roaring Kitty’s advice, get rich while the billionaire hedge funders, in particular Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) of Melvin Capital, begin to lose money, to the tune of US$1 billion a day.

Roaring Kitty becomes an internet sensation, an underdog David against Wall Street’s Goliath.

“A lot of people feel the system is broken,” he says. “The whole idea of the stock market is if you’re smart, and maybe with a little luck, you can make your fortune. Certainly not anymore. There’s no hope for the little guy. But maybe now there is.”