GameStop Rise of the Players review: a feel-good doc full of unexpected heroes

GameStop’s new documentary Rise of the PlayersIt is a sequel movie. You know the type — the kind of story that’s largely an oral history, with a feel-good climax that comes in a few lines of text, over a montage of smiles and laughter, right at the end of the film. This is how it becomes obvious. Rise of the Players is going in that direction about halfway through, after it has introduced nine ordinary people who aren’t just the good guys of this story, they’re the best kinds of subjects a documentarian could want.

These nine are the “OG Diamond Hands” who first invested in the beleaguered game retailer one year ago, then rode those holdings through a white-knuckle market anomaly that shot the share price damn near to Neptune. The obvious viewer question is “How did these folks make out once the GameStop story stopped being national news?”

Jonah Tulis’ 90 minute introduction and explanation is well-worth it for the coda. Rise of the Players’ round-hearted stars. Justin Dopierala is one of them, and he’s a manager at dairyland money who has made millionaires from nurses and welders. Rigoberto alcaraz is a Horatio-Alger legend whose parents were immigrants from Mexico. And Jenn Kruza’s indestructible smile is validated after she holds onto her GameStop shares long enough to make a huge profit, even while she’s navigating chemotherapy treatment with no health insurance.

Photo: Super LTD

The documentary’s final lines unabashedly call these nine investors “heroes,” which is a bold label for a group whose struggle consists of making a whole lot of money. It’s a fitting title. Tulis, Blake J. Harris and the GameStop producer (who were involved in the GameStop shortsnake that saw Reddit brothers, dank memes and hedge-fund billionaires and congressional hearings), came to an agreement one year later. Console WarsParamount Plus, 2020), have finally transformed the story into something that is worth cheering about.

GameStop: Rise of the Players is like one of those sports movies that’s great because it isn’t about sports. In this case, Tulis and Harris aren’t out to tell the definitive story of how GameStop’s share price went from $3.25 in August 2020 to $325 the following January. They’re smart enough to not bog the audience down in the concepts of short-selling, and they don’t build their narration on horse-race coverage of the stock itself. The film doesn’t dwell on capitalism or manipulating markets. It also does not address any conspiracy theories, such as those that sprung up after online trading was curtailed.

It is easy to see how this buildup happened: GameStop was viewed negatively by professional investors, causing a decline in its stock price and triggering confirmation bias rather than analysis. This scene is a lot like GameStop as it was seen by investors. Moneyball where a room full of baseball scouts can’t articulate why a certain player is any good, beyond “He looks like a good player.” GameStop was seen as a dinosaur awaiting a meteor strike, because someone slapped the brick-and-mortar business with the “Blockbuster 2.0” label, and it got repeated until it was taken as empirical fact.

The movie instead reveals that the smart money in all of this didn’t come from folks like Gabe Plotkin, the short seller whose hedge fund lost billions of dollars betting against GameStop and other stocks. Rod Alzmann chose the better bet. The trucking-company strategist headed up the crowdsourced due-diligence effort that keeps the movie’s heroes at the casino table when the big scores start coming in. As GameStop starts its ascent, drawing eye-rolling dismissals from analysts and pundits, Alzmann and twentysomething maverick Joe Fonicello draft a report pegging GameStop’s true share price at $169. Their validation comes not from the amount of money they make but in how GameStop is rated by a top-tier analyst at $175 a year later.

Alzmann notes that he was among the first to post about GameStop in the notorious WallStreetBets subreddit, where the “diamond hands” mentality first took hold. Alzmann had the posts taken down and was banned from that subreddit due to his advocacy. It’s an important distinction showing that Alzmann and his cohort — including software engineer Dmitriy Kozin and data visualization expert Farris Husseini — had the courage of their convictions well before Reddit’s bros started putting the screws to the hedge funds by refusing to sell their GameStop shares.

Photo: Super LTD

The Zoom hearing, which was held on February 17, 2021 by the House Financial Services Committee, is a smaller and more emotional high point. Yes, it’s hilarious to see Keith Gill, the outrageous streaming personality known as Roaring Kitty (or DeepFuckingValue) sitting in his Game of Thrones gaming chair, or telling the august panel, “I am not a cat.” But it’s also a strikingly moral moment. Plotkin, Kenneth Griffin (hedge fund titan) and, worst of all Vladimir Tenev (CEO trading app Robinhood), dissemble with prepared statements and refuses to answer any yes-or no questions. Gill, however, gives Rep. Maxine waters the direct answers. His clear and unambiguous buy recommendation for GameStop sends GameStop’s share price up the next day.

For it would have been simple GameStop: Rise of the PlayersIt could end up glorifying crypto-anarchists, tech-bro libertarians or alpha males who shout on CNBC to make a living. That trap is avoided. Harris and Tulis did the hard work to determine who was actually buying GameStop. Harris also investigated why. Griffin, Tenev and Plotkin didn’t participate. Gill was sued back by GameStop investors in February. Tulis is able to focus his attention on people who are more valuable than those who make millions from putting down companies that go bankrupt.

It’s a little grandiose to call GameStop: Rise of the PlayersIt’s a good feeling hit. There isn’t much conflict, except for the personal challenges presented by a cancer diagnosis, unemployment, or student loan debt. It’s mainly a story of good luck, but at least it happens to deserving people. Insta-docs could have identified people who made a profit from the squeeze and showed them the goods or the comfortable lifestyle they bought. Rise of the Players instead puts viewers in the investors’ seat at the poker table, making real their tension, self-doubt, and anxiety over holding onto a stock the experienced players say is worthless.

Sure, the happy ending has a dollar figure attached, and it’s a nice one. The real triumph is not the fact that these nine people were proved right but rather because they weren’t afraid to lose all their money. You can’t say the same about the big guys who lost billions of someone else’s.

GameStop: Rise of the PlayersJanuary 28th, 2010: The film’s debut in North American cinemas.