‘FAHRENHEIT 11/9’

R 2:05 HH ½H

After presenting, in its first few minutes, a brief recap of election night 2016, we watch as the evening of Nov. 8 slowly fades into the morning of Nov. 9 (the date referenced in the film’s title, which is also a play on Moore’s 2004 film, “Fahrenheit 9/11”). Moore asks in the film, “How the (expletive) did this happen?”

You were expecting maybe “fair and balanced”?

Trump, Moore argues, was never serious about running.

But although director Michael Moore cracks wise in his new documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9,” he’s dead serious about his central thesis, which presents Flint, Michigan, as a microcosm of the country, using the city’s disillusionment with politics as usual — a direct result of the water crisis there — as an explanation for why Trump won. The filmmaker, who was born in Flint and who had long argued that Trump should not be written off, has made what feels, in some ways, like a dispiriting I-told-you-so.

Gradually, “Fahrenheit 11/9” painstakingly pivots from a movie that seems to be working overtime to depress us to a movie that means to inspire us. By the second half, the film is presenting such political upstarts as New York’s congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a 10-term incumbent in this summer’s primary, and David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, as inspirations for other grass-roots activists who are impatient for change. “The America I want to save,” he says, “is the one we’ve never had.”

Starring: Michael Moore. (Crude language and some disturbing material and images.)

— Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post