Capitalism: A Love Story begins with a brilliantly edited montage equating our current state of despair with the fall of ancient Rome. This leads into a typically Michael Moorean voiceover pondering what our civilization will be remembered for centuries after our demise: funny cat videos, or the forced evictions resulting from the mortgage crisis? The actual answer is probably either “both” or “neither,” but the question is a rhetorical device. Capitalism: A Love Story is primarily an examination of how the country’s romance with free markets spectacularly soured, and secondarily an ode to the ways in which the masses have made their heartbreak visible, including viral video. Moore wisely spends less time intervening into the action here than he did in Sicko, often letting public eruptions of frustration speak for themselves.

Early on, Moore admits that he, too, fell in love with post-war capitalism as a child, and that the system used to work pretty well for the average middle-class American — even if it was made possible by a lack of global competition made possible by the United States’ military dominance. The problem is that there is no middle class anymore –– there is only, as one subject of the film puts it, “the people who got nothing and the people who have it all” –– and this Moore blames first on Ronald Reagan, who he slams as an actor-turned-pitchman-turned “spokesmodel as president,” then on the subsequent intermingling of Wall Street firms and government sectors. The film completely avoids the concept of personal responsibility, going out of its way to sell the notion that no intelligent human being could have been expected to understand the new financial instruments that governed the loans they signed their names to, thus ensuring that the predatory institutions and the congressional actions that bulldozed regulation to make way for them deserve the totality of the blame for the financial meltdown. It has become so bad, according to Moore, that pretty much every representative of the Catholic church that he could find in the midwest believes that contemporary capitalism is “evil.”

I wouldn’t expect a Michael Moore film to even attempt ideological balance, but the point to which Moore deliberately confuses the issues is remarkable. Beyond the deliberate muddying up of various explications of the jam we’re in (Moore stops just short of the “Math is hard” defense), structurally, Capitalism is almost free-associative. A story of a corrupt, for-profit juvenile hall tracks into Sully Sullenberger’s congressional testimony on the broken airline industry, thanks to the wire-thin connection that a boy unjustly banished to said juvie wants to become a pilot; Moore then has to tread very carefully from there to make the point that salary cutbacks for pilots have a direct correlation to crashes. One wonders if Capitalism won’t look almost avant garde when seen decades removed from the Moore cult of personality, which has a tendency to make his work seem more commercial than it really is.

And yet, the film is still full of patented Michael Moore shtick — the star/director has a bullhorn in one hand, and the other is permanently poised over the kitschy stock footage button. A major misstep is starting the picture with the borrowed B-movie warning that what we’re about to see is “truly one of the most unusual movies ever made,” when in fact this director has made several employing the exact same methodology. Footage Michael Moore getting turned away from a corporate headquarters by unsmiling security officers is, by this point, so familiar and so lacking in new information that it plays like white noise.

But in Capitalism’s only truly interesting twist, Moore freely acknowledges that said shtick is reaching the limits of its effectiveness. After two decades, his filmmaking methods are essentially the same, only more so, and the problems depicted in Roger and Me still exist, only more so. “For twenty years,” he sighs, “I tried to warn GM and others that this was coming, to no avail.” He acknowledges that the public theater that has become his trademark has become ineffective: “I’ve not been let into this building for twenty years,” he tells a guard at the bankrupt corporation’s headquarters. Later, he includes footage of an onlooker on Wall Street telling him to “Stop making movies.“ At the end of the film comes his most resigned voiceover rejoinder yet. “I can’t keep doing this,” he tells us, “Unless you join me.” As long as this is meant as a general call to noisemaking and not to the stale rent-a-cop bullying that accomplishes nothing other than making this film a good 25 minutes too long, then I’m in full agreement.

This review was adapted from a dispatch from the Toronto Film Festival.