Paul Dano

In Dumb Money (2023), Paul Dano takes a breath before going live; elsewhere, he absorbs his brother’s mockery without looking up from a spreadsheet. As Keith Gill, he makes an awkward man’s certainty look like something that requires daily effort. We warmed to him because he kept working through the mockery rather than asking for our sympathy. Craig Gillespie’s film does too little to explain Gill’s faith in GameStop, but Dano gives us the concentration behind it. For much of the first hour, his performance is enough to keep us interested.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) gave him his breakthrough as the silent, Nietzsche-reading Dwayne Hoover. There Will Be Blood (2007) followed, with his Eli Sunday facing Daniel Day-Lewis under Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction. His high, tremulous delivery gives Eli’s intensity an unpleasant edge. The recurring misfit roles can make Dano seem easier to predict than he is, but physical restraint and sudden outbursts offer quite different ways of making a scene uncomfortable.

He made his directing debut with Wildlife (2018), co-written with Zoe Kazan. The acting continued across markedly different parts: the Riddler in The Batman (2022), and Burt Fabelman in The Fabelmans (2022), Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical family drama. Playing a version of Spielberg’s father takes him some distance from the young outsiders who made his name.

Dumb Money gives us a particularly clear example of what works and where the limitations lie. Dano does not play Gill’s headband and webcam for easy affection; the pauses and the persistence are what hold our attention. Yet we still need to know why this man believes in this company, and Gillespie’s film never gives us enough of an answer. We recommend the performance more readily than the film. Start there for the pleasure of watching an actor take a supposedly endearing eccentric seriously.