,” is an amateur stock trader, and he also sees himself as a rebel. Keith, unlike the Wall Street players, actuallyThe 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 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 division of Reddit.
“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 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. Yet what’s most compelling about “Dumb Money” is that Gillespie, working from a layered script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo , draws back, at least for a while, from over-romanticizing Keith Gill’s one-man-against-the-system crusade to turn GameStop into the salvation of retail investors.