Capitalism: A Love Story includes all the above. Even those who count themselves hostile to Moore (and they are legion) would admit he has the courage to tackle big subjects. After railing against America’s gun laws, its healthcare system and the Iraq war, Moore now zeroes in on the capitalist system itself.

It’s an unwieldy subject and, predictably, it’s a mixed bag: on the one hand, Moore effectively tells small-scale stories illustrating how the rich and powerful screw the little people, while also indulging in windy, sentimental generalising.

Thus he offers poignant scenes of decent people having their homes re-possessed by banks (shockingly, we learn there’s a foreclosure on an American home every seven and a half seconds). He reveals the appalling details of the squalid “dead peasants” insurance scheme, under which large corporations receive sizeable insurance payouts whenever one of their employees dies. And he talks to airline pilots so badly paid that they qualify for food stamps.

Yet Moore stumbles in analysing the big picture. He dutifully points his finger at his bad guys: Reagan, Dubya, Alan Greenspan, and, of course, Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. Yet it’s unclear what his remedy would be. He toys with the word “socialism” without quite endorsing it, settling instead for a more woolly option: “democracy”. He seems to forget that, like it or not (and many of us did not), it was a democratic process that saw Bush the younger re-elected as president in 2004.

Still, this feels like Moore’s most personal film to date. He takes his elderly father who worked on a Michigan assembly line for General Motors back to the site of the demolished factory, where they gaze at it sadly. He talks to Catholic priests he has known since childhood; they gravely assure him that capitalism is evil and anti-human.

The closure of the GM plant (a theme that harks back to his breakthrough film Roger and Me) obviously left deep emotional scars on Moore, and one would hesitate to tell him personally that General Motors’ time was up: even Americans had begun to lose their taste for the ugly, oversized, gas-guzzling cars that were the company’s stock-in-trade.

Capitalism: A Love Story will do nothing to change anyone’s minds about Michael Moore. It will anger right-wingers, who confer power on him by getting so steamed up about his work. Some on the left will remain embarrassed by his unsubtle tactics.

His core of fans will be delighted by his striking blend of agitprop and caustic humour – enough for both a good night out and the reassurance of feeling oneself politically engaged.

Overall, the film confirms Moore as a provocative, skilled entertainer, but also exposes his lack of a first-class mind. Here, as ever, he outlines a big argument, but fails to sustain it.

Still, he ups the ante on his usual loudspeaker scene when he strides furiously around Wall Street, encircling bank buildings with yards and yards of yellow Crime Scene tape. And his deadpan voiceover comment that the repayment structures of the sub-prime mortgage industry most closely resemble those of the Mafia is one of many exhilarating moments – funny, angry and deadly accurate.