三年前,基思·吉尔是一个普通人of limited means who decided to take all his money and invest it in GameStop, a company that sells video games and electronics in malls. At the time, Wall Street believed the company was circling the drain, but Gill thought it was a good investment, and he followed his stock’s progress in a series of video podcasts on Reddit and YouTube.

Six months later, Gill’s initial $50,000 investment blossomed into a $50 million fortune, and the hedge funds that had bet against GameStop were struggling to survive. Such a David and Goliath story is a natural for movies, but “Dumb Money” is more than the kind of inevitable film that follows every notable public occurrence like a reaction in physics.

Two things in particular distinguish it: It has a distinct tone — absurd but not ridiculous, comic but not safe — so that the audience can never relax into an assurance that everything will be OK. And it’s a story from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that depicts the pandemic era and yet is not about the pandemic. As such, there’s a feeling of recent events suddenly transformed into history.

Arguably, director Craig Gillespie and the screenwriters could have ignored the pandemic and told the story without showing the characters wearing masks in public. But they were smart enough to realize that the masking told half the story. “Dumb Money” is a tale of 2020, and the movie captures that 2020 feeling — gray, depressed, anxious and almost comically miserable.

One could argue that Gill’s online success was itself an only-in-2020 phenomenon. At a time when people were shut in and using their computers as their main link to the outside, Gill got a half million followers on YouTube alone and inspired multiple small investors to buy stock in GameStop, which ended up increasing the stock’s value.

Gill’s sunny personality undoubtedly helped. As his videos reveal, he was upbeat and engaging, no less likable onscreen than Paul Dano (“The Fabelmans”), who plays him here.

“Dumb Money” follows multiple characters whose lives are all bound up in the GameStop story. America Ferrera (“Barbie”) is a nurse who invests her modest savings in GameStop stock. Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder are college girls hoping to pay off their student debt through their GameStop earnings.Anthony Ramos(“In the Heights,” “Hamilton”) is a GameStop employee, hoping to make enough money off the stock that he can tell off his boss. AndPete Davidson, in a surprisingly minor role, plays Keith’s useless brother.

Those are the regular people. On the other side of the equation are the billionaire suits played by Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman and Vincent D’Onofrio, who all have a stake in GameStop’s demise. They are investors who bet against companies, making it less likely that those companies can survive. Bad enough that they profit off the misery of others — they’re lower than that: They help to create the misery in the first place.

“Dumb Money” is so nicely paced and intelligently organized that it’s only later on that you realize, if you ever do, that most of the main characters never meet each other. That dislocation — that pandemic isolation of people into impenetrable pods — is another very 2020 touch.

Finally, those of us who like actual veracity in their “true” stories will appreciate that “Dumb Money” sticks to the known facts. When characters are interviewed on television, we see the actual interviewers from 2020 and early 2021, with the actors intercut or superimposed into the footage. It’s one more element that makes the film feel real and immediate.

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com