Moore hits the mark.

Somewhere along the way, Michael Moore added a tiny shred of subtlety to his rhetorical arsenal. A raconteur accustomed to spraying ideas and invective as if they were the same thing, Moore isn't known for pulling back the reins, but Fahrenheit 9/11 tones down his blustery act, finding room for nuance in areas ranging from September 11 footage (the planes hit the buildings, but the screen is black) to his own onscreen presence (he narrates, but is largely invisible).

With a target as meaty as George W. Bush and the key players in his Administration, Moore himself wisely sticks close to the periphery: A household name and wealthy celebrity, he's the (figurative) little guy no longer, which might have made him a distraction in a film with so much to say about the President and America's role and goals in Iraq. Stripped of the obscurity he'd need in order to wage sneak-attack interviews, he's better off staying outside the frame, assembling his case with the aid of talking beads, unreleased news footage, and empathetic small-scale studies of the individuals affected by large-scale U.S. decision-making.

Fahrenheit 9/11 cuts deepest when Moore trains his camera on Lila Lip-scomb, a working-class mother in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The filmmaker's most powerful weapon has long been his street-level populism, his understanding and appreciation of how everyday people live, work, think, and barely get by. In Lipscomb, he finds Fahrenheit 9/11's conscience, as her cheery demeanor gives way to grief and anger when her son, a scared young soldier in Iraq, dies in a helicopter crash. Her riveting interviews transcend the choose-a-side hype that has trailed the film since long before its release: Some of Moore's arguments hold more water than others, but Lipscomb's visceral reaction to tragedy illustrates the price of war even more vividly than the film's horrific footage of severed limbs and charred corpses.

Unfortunately, Fahrenheit 9/11 tries to illuminate more than just the causes and effects of military adventurism in Iraq. Much of the film's first half dwells on a conspiracy theory explicated in Moore's 2003 book Dude, Where's My Country? The claim is that Bush's close ties to the Saudi royal family (as well as to the multinational corporation run by Osama bin Laden's wealthy relatives) led U.S. officials to grant Saudi nationals special favors in the days following September 11, at the expense of Americans' safety and the search for bin Laden. Moore's case is far from airtight, however, as he strings together circumstantial evidence that proves little more than the minor revelation that one wealthy and flawed family has lucrative business ties to another wealthy and flawed family.

It's not even altogether clear what Moore is driving at in linking the Bushes to the bin Ladens: The latter family's far-reaching power and influence has been extensively documented, and the Saudis' post-September 11 security privileges, while unseemly and poorly executed, hardly constitute a treasonous breach of the public trust. If anything, Moore's argument about the Saudis' major ownership role in the U.S. economy helps justify the sweetheart deals. After all, if antagonizing the Saudis might lead to an economically devastating, large-scale withdrawal of funds from U.S. banks, as Moore suggests, wouldn't it be prudent to keep that from happening to an economy already in crisis?

Shakier still are Moore's attempts to inject levity into the proceedings. Though he scores easy laughs with found footage of the president's syntactical buffoonery, his jokey song cues ("Vacation" when Bush goes on vacation, "Cocaine" when his past is discussed) come off as ham-fisted and predictable. Even some of the Bush footage, including Fahrenheit 9/11's closing line, will likely strike a familiar chord in any regular viewer of Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

Moore's style proves far more effective when, in the film's excellent second half, he turns his attention to the Administration's reckless rush to war and apparent lack of appreciation for the conflict's consequences. He resorts to a few old-school pranks on members of Congress--reading the Patriot Act from an ice cream wagon's loudspeaker system for the benefit of those who didn't read the bill before voting on it, trying to get them to enlist their children in the military--but those playful methods give way to pure grief and fury when the costs of war snap into focus.

Moore's picture of war's impact spans beyond images of bullets and bodies, sprawling into the messy margins of combat. In a segment in which soldiers discuss the meaning of the simplistic rock music blaring on their headphones as they storm into battle, Fahrenheit 9/11 treads perilously close to mockery, until it becomes clear that Moore is simply humanizing those who fight the country's battles. This is a volunteer army, he notes, in which the volunteers protect the United States as a means of escaping life near or below its poverty line. Moore hits his marks most consistently when he operates on that human scale, dwelling on the devastation that accompanies the loss of a single life on either side. He shows the restraint to include footage of bereaved relatives on both sides of the war, without feeling the need to explicitly stitch their parallel anger and sorrow together in the audience's mind.

Moore has vigorously defended his film's every claim, in the media and elsewhere, in the wake of its hotly hyped and massively lucrative release. He's taken great pains to clarify that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a cinematic op-ed piece rather than a true documentary--after all, no true documentary would spend so much time dwelling on what might have gone through a subject's mind at various times--but it's more gut level, and more powerful, than that parsing of words might indicate. Gone are Moore's past films' diversionary meandering into minor details, along with his self-aggrandizing bullying of hapless receptionists and middlemen. As a filmmaker and a ubiquitous public figure, he may still draw ire and admiration in equal measure, but he deserves credit for etching an unsettling assortment of images and ideas into the public consciousness, where they've belonged all along.

Stephen Thompson is editor of The Onion A.V. Club.