By Johnny Ray Huston

OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT is getting ready for his close-up. He isn't on air yet, so instead of playing to the camera, he's demonstrating what might be his day-to-day vision: a vacant stare into the empty distance. The lack of expression is eerily familiar – it recalls the uncanny impression of a mannequin offered by his father in Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway's documentary Feed.

Yes, the opening credits of Fahrenheit 9/11 stare into the "steely blue eyes with no warmth in them" (to quote Morrissey) of George W. Bush; Feed-ing more than once on Bush's unscripted moments, Michael Moore later catches sight of his subject's "humorless smile" March 19, 2003. Seconds before addressing the nation about the bombing of Iraq, Bush sizes up his global audience with a self-satisfied, contemptuous smirk. The man who will soon hide behind the grave-faced political mask looks like a jerk.

That passage and Fahrenheit 9/11's credit sequence (which also contains images of Condoleeza Rice being made up, Paul Wolfowitz using spit as hair gel, and a moist-browed Colin Powell being dabbed with tissues) owe a debt to Feed's candid-camera exposure of 1992's presidential candidates. But unlike Rafferty and Village Voice scribe Ridgeway, who let satellite outtakes speak for themselves, Moore can't resist layering commentary – in the form of a creepy-cheap synth music soundtrack – over inherently revealing images.

Fahrenheit 9/11's pivotal point goes one step further. The occasion is the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Aware that one plane had hit the World Trade Center, Bush opted not to forgo a scheduled photo op that involved reading a children's book with a second-grade class in Florida. Moore has the footage, so when an aide walks in the room and whispers news of the second WTC attack, viewers can see Bush remain frozen in his seat from 9:05 a.m. until ... 9:11. "Was he wondering if maybe he should have come to work more often?" the director asks. As the president sits pouting like he's been punked, Moore knowingly breaks a golden rule of documentary, placing words in the mind, if not the mouth, of a mute subject: "Was it the guy my daddy delivered weapons to?"

This segment encapsulates Fahrenheit 9/11's power and its problems. The president was in an elementary school, in the state where he stole his job, as the worst foreign attack on U.S. soil took place, and still he gave a P.R. event precedence over a national emergency. Loaded with damning irony, the factual material doesn't need editorial, much less dramatic, gloss. Locked into the harsh truth of the camera's eye, the president's face conveys wounded vindictiveness rather than an urgent sense of duty. In deigning to speak for Bush, Moore places himself on the same degraded plane of discourse he's mocking: petty grievance masquerading as political intent.

But Moore wouldn't be able to sell himself as Disney's bastard son, a surrogate Democratic candidate – the man Bush is running from, instead of running against – if he was an angelic ambassador of documentary ethics. And Bush isn't the only one playing hide-and-seek in Fahrenheit 9/11: on the film's poster, the lower half of Moore's face is obscured by a manila envelope marked "Confidential." "Is he smirking?" is as valid a question as "What does the envelope contain?," and the film, to its credit and detriment, doesn't provide a complete answer to either. Moore isn't on-screen as often as in previous films, his direct – rather than directorial – grandstanding urges largely refined to hit-and-miss sarcastic voice-overs (and the occasional smarmy one that oozes compassion).

Fahrenheit 9/11 contains no investigative bombshell that will cause the Bush administration to crumble into ash like vampires trapped beneath the equator's noontime sun; in fact, it manages perhaps only a single major revelation that hasn't been reported by sources outside televised and mainstream print media. That isn't the point of Moore's populist approach, which is as likely to sample C-Span, or Prince Bandar bin Sultan on Larry King Live, as it is to uncover secret documents. The director compiles his personal greatest-hits info-taint-ment look at the Bush administration's craven decision-making and its human toll at home and abroad. His portrayal of the World Trade Center attacks is remarkably similar to Alejandro González Iñárritu's contribution to 9'11'01; his war footage travels from Michigan to Iraq and back to Michigan again, finding children with missing limbs and grieving, enraged mothers. Lila Lipscomb, the narrative focal point of Fahrenheit 9/11's second half, wears a Mickey Mouse T-shirt at one point, a detail Michael Eisner couldn't have been happy about.

Moore's folksy digressive tactics sometimes meander into whimsical surface treatments of subjects that deserve enraged feature-length movies of their own – police infiltration of citizen groups such as Peace Fresno are just the tip of Bush era civil rights violations, and the movie's treatment of U.S. border patrol issues is slipshod. More problematic, Fahrenheit 9/11's contextual elements are erratic. Moore doesn't forget to target ineffectual "leaders" such as Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, but he neglects to mention that the senators who failed to back up the House representatives and voters of Duval County, Fla., were Democrats. His movie mocks Bush's vacation in August 2001, yet August vacations are a presidential tradition. Investigative journalists such as Craig Unger are identified, yet the Bush family's Saudi business associates largely remain a nameless horde, grouped within a xenophobic montage set to R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People."

A dogged character assassin's fixation on the Bush family means that other phantoms of the White House – in particular, the Gollum-like Dick Cheney – retain comparative secrecy. (Colin Powell, no stranger to odd pronunciation, repeatedly voices Saddam Hussein's first name as sodom.) Like Feed, and like Alexandra Pelosi's appallingly cutesy Journeys with George, Moore's movie is steeped in election-year politics. But viewed 12 years later, Feed is a penetrating, even prophetic historical work: one of Rafferty and Ridgeway's final clips displays Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping up the crowd at a Bush Sr. fundraiser by deriding the Democrats as "girlie men." Even Pelosi's puff piece spotlights the tactics Bush uses to dupe observers into thinking he's a charming man. The next five months will prove how quickly (or not) and effectively (or not) Fahrenheit 9/11's comparatively overt agenda dates. Only time will tell if Jean-Luc Godard is right, or merely bitter that this year's Palme d'Or winner cites François Truffaut rather than him.

One thing's for certain: commercial moviegoers won't find a more thorough multiplex attack on Bush's record – if they want one. The jeremiad Moore constructs before and after his movie's credit sequence is what audiences are paying for, because in March of this year, interested viewers could witness a spectacle similar to Fahrenheit 9/11's opening credits on prime time, free of charge. Throughout Bush's State of the Union broadcast – an index-card performance that might have merited a passing grade in a junior high speech class – Rice and company, glimpsed from above, looked like grimacing targets in a whack-a-mole game. Moore knows how to feed a Bush and whack one down to size, but counterpropaganda doesn't decide elections. Neither does box-office success. Voters do. Or at least, in the United States – expensive home of the free, where the president is never black, female, or gay – they're supposed to.