Director Craig Gillespie won my heart with I, Tonya, his scathing 2017 film about the quintessentially American life of skater Tonya Harding. In demonstrating how to redeem the degraded biopic genre, I, Tonya was so brilliant, I even forgave Gillespie for his subsequent film, the bloated Disney reboot Cruella (2021). He quickly rebounded, directing the first three episodes of the surprisingly insightful Hulu series Pam & Tommy (2022). He always does great work when he’s back on his turf — sharp satirical takes on the lives of working-class Americans who become celebrities, however minor, and however briefly, thereby getting a class-conscious range of grotesque cultural experience that’s eye-opening.

And now he’s back in top form once again with the endearingly funny biographical comedy drama Dumb Money, currently playing at a theater near you. The screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo was based on the 2021 nonfiction book by Ben Mezrich, The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees.

“Dumb money,” as the movie tells us in one of its explanatory title cards, is the scornful phrase used by big investment firm traders in describing “retail investors,” the regular individuals who risk their little savings on the stock market. The sneering contempt of the haves for the have-nots is the context for the movie, which is about how one adorkable real-life small trader named Keith Gill, working out of his basement during the COVID epidemic, defied the odds by investing and encouraging his online followers to invest in GameStop, a company “shorted” by hedge fund managers who expected the company to fail. Here’s what that means: