In common with Michael Moore’s previous films, the best qualities of “Capitalism: A Love Story” are also its worst. Moore’s acid humor, folksy populism, and unerring ear for satire combine to form a massively successful polemic against late capitalism; but these characteristics also seal the film inside an unbreakable bubble. The positions he espouses are so inarguable as to neutralize them. Like the nuttier factions of the right-wing echo chamber, his case is made more by careful stage-management than a direct confrontation with facts. Debate about the wisdom of handing over our economy to the voodoo priests of Wall Street is important and necessary, but the debate in Moore’s film is hamstrung by his persistent recourse to emotional appeals. What other conclusions could an audience draw about Goldman Sachs when Moore prefaces a trip to its New York headquarters with a trip to a rural farm to meet a family thrown out of their home after a bank foreclosure?

What Moore has going for him is that he happens to be right. “Capitalism” briskly excoriates American greed in a variety of ways—easy pickings, though Moore still manages to conjure up gems like “dead peasant insurance”—but more importantly attempts a necessarily tentative outline of Wall Street’s mystical cloud of unknowing. The deflating irrefutability of Moore’s argument bears a telling ambiguity: his movie convinces without convincing because the problematic truths of global capitalism are so mountainous, so obvious, they resist our ability to imagine an attack against them. The children weeping for their dead mother, and the financial ruin that results, wear empty, blank expressions, totally stunned in their grief. The farmer who accepts a check for a thousand dollars from the bank for burning what possessions remain on his reclaimed property is so angry he comes off as numb and speechless. Even in Washington there is confusion. A Congressman, Baron Hill of Indiana, and the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, Elizabeth Warren, sputter in helpless perplexity as they describe the bailout as if it were a baffling covert operation staged by the Wall Street and the White House. Their faces tell a story of despairing helplessness; Pharaoh’s slaves must have gazed at the pyramids this way.

Factual accuracy has long ago ceased to be a worthwhile criterion for judging Moore’s films, but in “Capitalism”, as elsewhere, he has a knack for broader truths. For example, Moore attempts to unloosen the death-grip right-wingers have on Christianity by exploding the notion that one can love Christ and money equally. Capitalism doesn’t sit easy with actual Christian teaching, an obvious point made with shocking infrequency here in God’s country. Another big-picture truth is the American, largely Democratic legacy of insisting that government provide social assistance for citizens. Of course, this tradition always existed alongside its opposite force, the other great American qualities of greed and selfishness, but Moore is right to resurrect FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights” as a way of reminding us that there used to be two sides to the struggle. Today’s Left is a collection of mediocrities working to bring about a slightly less noxious brand of conservatism rather than a gang of fighters for true liberalism. FDR’s ghost is a simple haunting reminder that there is no longer any significant antagonism in Washington. Not what Democrats fought for in the past, but that they were fighting at all is the somber point of Moore’s look back at Roosevelt’s unrealized vision.

If “Capitalism” succeeds in seeing the forest over the trees, the film’s best section is devoted to a concrete instance of direct action against the machinery of capital. Moore shot inspiring footage of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, where in December of last year union workers took over the plant to protest ownership’s plans to close it after Bank of America effectively ruined the company by canceling a credit line. Though it quickly turned into a typical media event—Moore’s cameras only adding to the queasy reality-show aspect of what transpired—the story of the sit-in strike cannot be told and re-told often enough. The picture of blue-collar Chicago strikers taking on owners and banks, helped by big-hearted locals who provided support both moral and material, is of course a sensationalized David and Goliath tale. (There’s even a Dickensian twist in the plant’s closing just before Christmas.) But the message is a vital one. As lost and hopeless as other people in “Capitalism” appear, here at last are some average citizens who were apparently too stupid to know they couldn’t fight owners and bankers—they proved so stupid, in fact, that they won a triumphant victory which at this point looks like a relatively durable one.