Dumb Money Nails the Rich Idiots of Wall Street

Dumb Money, the breezy new movie about the GameStop stock hysteria of early 2021, starts in a hedge fund guy’s pandemic retreat mansion. Investor Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) is trying to get a house demolished so he can put a tennis court there (true story, by the way) when he gets a call informing him a bunch of Redditors have blown an enormous hole in his short position against the video game retailer’s stock. A distressed Plotkin sprints through various well-manicured beachfront backyards to get to his desk in another mansion and make a call. He’s down billions, he is not a graceful sprinter, and he is doubly pissed because of all the red tape gumming up his tennis court.

The scene flexes the best thing about Dumb Money, which opens in limited release Friday. The movie tells a slightly oversimplified story about the memestock frenzy, hamming up its populism themes to preserve a narrative of rapscallions on Reddit fighting against giants of Wall Street. There was a little more to the saga than that, and Dumb Money could’ve fleshed out those details better than most of the press did (present company included) when telling the first-day story way back when. You remember: A massive group of retail traders who organized on the internet bid the price of GameStop’s stock up over a few days, seeking to both make money and blow up Wall Street’s shorts of the stock. The movie tracks how that movement came together—while leaving out that some rich guys also made money on the whole to-do.

But where the movie is brilliant is in how it treats its hand-picked villains. Dumb Money is a movie about an unprecedented week in the stock market and the forces that brought it about. As a retelling, it’s solid. But as an illustration of how unserious and unimpressive the smartest guys in the financial room can be, it hits a bull’s-eye.

Ken Griffin, the hedge funder who also controls the Robinhood online brokerage’s most important market-making partner, gets an appropriate portrayal by Nick Offerman. In addition to giving Offerman a chance to make a very Ron Swanson point about not doing things just because the government tells you to, the movie uses Griffin to show how financial titans are coddled and swaddled by hired help. “How many people are in the room with you right now?” a congressman asks Griffin in a real exchange from the post-madness Capitol Hill hearing. The movie bakes in Griffin shooing a bunch of handlers out of the room so that he can answer that it’s just a few. As I watched, I remembered an afternoon that winter in 2021 when a media-relations flack for Griffin’s market-making operation, Citadel Securities, called me on the phone to argue that I had misled readers by not clarifying the difference well enough between Griffin’s market-maker, which handled Robinhood customers’ trades, and his hedge fund, which is just called “Citadel.” Slate’s editors dismissed her argument, but it stuck with me: A PR person had never worked me so hard over something so silly. The movie also does a good job explaining why Griffin’s people were so jumpy that week: His hedge fund had invested in Plotkin’s, and that investment stood to do a lot better if Plotkin’s firm would stop losing billions as GameStop’s price went up. (The cause-and-effect wasn’t that simple, and a lawsuit that alleged collusion later got tossed out of court.)

Plotkin, as he preps for his own testimony, needs staff to explain to him why, in his opening statement, he should describe his alma mater Northwestern as only “a good college” and should avoid testifying in front of a wine cellar he insists isn’t that big. The movie shows Plotkin signing up for a TV interview at the height of the turmoil, where he plans to defend his hedge fund Melvin Capital’s financials, but then he gets scared and closes his laptop seconds before going on air. Griffin and another big hedge fund guy, New York Mets owner Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays a carefree but cutthroat rich guy very well), invest in Plotkin’s blown-up hedge fund, but it closes its doors anyway.

Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan), the co-founder and chief executive of Robinhood, gets the finest and fairest treatment of all. We see him and co-founder Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota) entertaining a journalist who wants to know how the company makes money despite offering commission-free trading. (The answer is payments from market-makers like Griffin’s, via a practice founded by Bernie Madoff that relies on and encourages customers to trade frequently rather than buy equities and hang on to them.) A clumsy Tenev thinks a better angle would be to focus on how Robinhood is “democratizing” finance by making it available to the little guy. It’s like Occupy Wall Street! And does the reporter know that both Tenev and Bhatt are immigrants? When regulatory collateral requirements lead Robinhood to halt GameStop purchases and thus the GameStop rally, a straight-man Robinhood exec calls Tenev. He goes into the closet at a party, sounds confused, hangs up the call, and then swigs a beer. When he testifies before Congress, the movie shows his legs quivering beneath the table. They may not have been in real life, but Dumb Money gets its idea across: This guy is not qualified to have this much influence on the American stock market, and he is in over his head. The movie also, without needing words, highlights some of the ways Robinhood hooked its customers. Green confetti flashes when the film’s composite characters (including a nurse played by America Ferrera, a college student played by Myha’la Herrold, and a GameStop employee with a $136 net worth played by Anthony Ramos) place their GME buy orders on the Robinhood app. They’re all part of the HODL gang following YouTuber/Redditor Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, aka DeepFuckingValue, aka, in this movie, a very good Paul Dano who doesn’t crave attention but simply likes the stock.

At turns, the movie simplifies or exaggerates the real story in order to stick to a David-versus-Goliath narrative. It barely even nods to all the rich and institutional investors who rode the GameStop wave and got rich on the way up but skipped the ride down. It hand-holds the audience in the direction of conspiracy where none seems to exist. At one point, the WallStreetBets subreddit is locked and hidden, and the movie has you think it’s because someone (presumably Reddit?) wants to kill the coordination behind the GameStop rally. In reality, WallStreetBets was a great advertisement about Reddit’s business model and power, and a likelier reason was to address content moderation concerns. (The entire GameStop story became a breeding ground for antisemitism in exactly the ways anyone would expect.) And for all the laugh lines over the course of the movie, nothing got a louder chuckle from my theater than the moment the Winklevoss twins were revealed as executive producers during the credits. Indeed, the same very wealthy Winklevii who launched a risky crypto exchange that at one point stopped paying out deposits.

Still, the movie is a much better retelling of January 2021 than I thought it would be. At the very moment GME was going to the moon, a gold rush was on for the story’s film rights, and I walked into my screening of the movie this month fearing that I would see a rushed product that did not do the story justice. Instead, Dumb Money is entertaining without being that misleading. The filmmakers do well to get a thick financial glossary across without bogging down the movie. They make some sacrifices in that regard, but they come up with a digestible product. In The Big Short, the last big Hollywood studio effort at capturing a cataclysmic and weird stock market development, the filmmakers realized they would have a hard time explaining the mechanics in a way that didn’t put the audience asleep. So that movie settled on putting Margot Robbie in a bathtub and Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and those actresses paused the proceedings to tell us all about subprime loans and collateralized debt obligations. The people who made Dumb Money just had some composite characters and real-life TV footage to keep us up to speed.

But the movie’s best triumph isn’t that it quickly explains short selling. It isn’t that Rogen, as Plotkin, delivers a succinct history of the Piggly Wiggly grocery short squeeze of the 1920s.
It isn’t even that Ferrera, fresh off delivering one of the better monologues in recent cinematic history in Barbie (you know the one), delivers another really good one about corporate greed against the little guy. The audience might forget those things, but it will remember how silly the suits looked as they struggled to deal with perceived lightweights who had organized against them. It will remember the founder of Robinhood shaking, the boss of Melvin Capital fleeing a webcam with a reporter on the other end, and the billionaire market-maker testifying before Congress in what looked like a straitjacket. There is plenty of dumb money on the internet, but sometimes the dumbest money turns out to be the people who have a lot of it.