. At the centre is Keith Gill, played by Paul Dano with appealing modesty and geekiness. A small-time investor with a Reddit following and a YouTube channel where he goes by Roaring Kitty, he starts buying shares of GameStop, the failing brick-and-mortar gaming store. His social media followers, bored during the pandemic, take his lead.
The real-life Wall Street figures are all played for comic effect, not as moustache-twirling villains The important part social media played in the GameStop story is not examined here so much as it is used, effectively, as a visual prop, with montages of crude Reddit comments and news clips of financial journalists. The real-life Wall Street figures, played by a starry line-up, are introduced at the start in ascending order of wealth. Seth Rogen is the hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin.
At one point, Gill's investment balloons to $11m, while Plotkin's hedge fund has lost several billion. GameStop shares fell back to Earth after the trading app Robinhood, which so many of the small investors had used, restricted trading on the stock to avoid a market crash. The US Congress asked the players in the whole incident to testify about their, and as the film ends we see Dano, Rogen and Offerman in that Zoom testimony, intercut with real Congressional representatives.