Dumb Money captures the internet fanaticism of the GameStop stock rush almost one year into the pandemic. Sony Pictures September 22, 2023, 12:23 PM ET It seems the turnaround time for films that are “based on a true story” is forever shrinking. Dumb Money, the director Craig Gillespie’s new movie about the GameStop-stock craze, chronicles events that took place in January 2021: a surprising boom in the brick-and-mortar video-game retailer’s stock value that eventually created a mini-crisis on Wall Street. The writer Ben Mezrich published an account of the story, The Antisocial Network, in September 2021; production on its film adaptation started a year later. This raises a question: How could they possibly create a period piece chronicling events that are so recent? My fear was that Dumb Money would resemble a dramatized Wikipedia page, explaining the technical details of a news story that viewers can just Google themselves. That’s a subgenre popularized by hits like Adam McKay’s The Big Short, a retelling of the 2008 financial crisis that contained repeated jokey scenes of celebrities …