The comedic docudrama Dumb Money raises more issues than it can sort out. Director Craig Gillespie tells how the real-life Keith Gill (played by a doughy-faced, shrewd-eyed Paul Dano) rose from his Brockton, Mass., basement, where he did a podcast on financial reports — a nerdy hobby — to become a multimillionaire defending the stock-market value of GameStop, the video emporium chain and a perfect escapist-ideological haven for Middle American nerds. As an amateur trader, Gill gains an online audience and good fortune when GameStop’s stock rises against the odds given by smart-money financial sharks. Gill mocks these elites through his online moniker “Roaring Kitty” on his Reddit and YouTube videos. (The term “dumb money” is how they sneer back at him.)

Gill unexpectedly advances to the infamous world of quasi-celebrity, which is where Gillespie locates his real subject: American class status. Dumb Money is most interesting as an extrapolation of Warhol’s quip that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” It places Gill alongside financial big shots Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogan), Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan), and the motley anonymous followers Gill influences, Hollywood’s usual diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) bit players (America Ferrara, Talia Ryder, Myha’la Herrold, Anthony Ramos). This panoply of professional and domestic types suggests a Capra-esque bunch. It reminded me of the good Middle American portrayals in Gillespie’s The Finest Hours. But there’s a sneakily cynical facility to how Dumb Money portrays its little-guy-vs.-the-big-guys premise. The presumption of working-class virtue lacks the moral basis that a David-vs.-Goliath analogy would imply.

That’s because Gillespie has created a world without spiritual substance. (This film about filthy lucre needed the type of bemused moral vision that Jared Hess brought to the subcultures of Nacho Libre, Gentlemen Broncos, and Don Verdean.) Gillespie depicts a credible social range, including Gill’s wife (Shailene Woodley), brother (Pete Davidson), and parents (Clancy Brown, Kate Burton), yet as naturalistic and believable as it looks, this Covid-era America appears fundamentally lost.

Gillespie impressively combines performance scenes and TV clips, Zoom, podcast POVs, and digitized backdrops — no doubt inspired by Adam McKay’s financial-trading film The Big Short. McKay’s convoluted flick passed off snarky Hollywood narrative finagling for social insight, and Dumb Money winds up almost as unsatisfying — certainly as suspicious.

The script is by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (both from Orange Is the New Black), who are purveyors of cynicism with questionable social perception. When Gill appears before the House Committee on Financial Services — the universally dreaded highpoint of his 15 minutes of fame — in suit and tie, his long hair slicked back, looking respectful (not Fettermanish), he speechifies: “A lot of people feel the system is broken. The whole idea of the stock market is if you are smart and if you are a little lucky, you can make your fortune. Certainly not anymore.” Later, Gill tells his wife, “There’s no hope for the little guy. Maybe now there is.” Capra would never be so obvious — or so dubious — but Gill’s observation would then evince sincerity. (Good actor Dano isn’t a Gary Cooper paragon—instead he always personifies our weaknesses.)

Gill’s judgmental line reminded me that Gillespie also directed the despicable I, Tonya and Lars and the Real Girl. Once again, he’s caught in a pop-media circus — which is also a moral circus. His many authenticating clips feature the flank of Hollywood’s political revolution, its media aristocracy — the noxious media pundits Stephen Colbert, Jim Cramer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and then the political clowns Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. All of them present a witch’s brew of demotic diversity and craven dishonesty. These elites helped create the striking class division that now defines present-day American conditions. But Gillespie, an Australian, never suggests there’s any other authority or ideal for our happiness. How can Gillespie combat that horrid reality while trying to tell an honest story about struggle and survival behind American success? He can’t figure out their moral stance in an immoral era. Despite its cynical sentimentality, Dumb Money worships dumb money.