Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9' is life under Trump in a nutshell

To watch Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is to relive, in two jam-packed hours, the experience of being an American for the past two years.

If it gets a bit scattered trying to pay attention to too many things at once, if it gives you emotional whiplash as you move through despair and terror and righteous fury – well, isn't that exactly what the past couple of years have been?

Fahrenheit 11/9 opens with footage from November 7, 2016 – election day, when Americans across the political spectrum were united in their assumption that Hillary Clinton would emerge victorious over Donald Trump.

Rewatching coverage of Clinton's ecstatic campaign now, two years after her crushing defeat, feels not just bittersweet but surreal. It's as if the footage has come to us from some other, happier reality where Clinton prevailed as predicted.

But that wasn't an alternate universe, of course; it was our own recent past. And despite its title, Fahrenheit 11/9 is less interested in the day of than it is in all the days leading up to and out of it. Likewise, the film is less about Trump as a singular figure than he is in Trump as a product of, an catalyst for, all the forces surrounding him.

Along the way, Moore hits on the Flint water crisis (which make for the film's most cogent and compelling segments), the Parkland shooting, and the West Virginia teacher's strike. He looks to Rick Snyder's governorship of Michigan as a forerunner of Donald Trump's presidency, and draws the frightening, if by now depressingly familiar, parallels between Nazi Germany and Trump-era America, playing one of Trump's speeches over footage of Adolf Hitler.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Moore can't resist tooting his own horn from time to time (at one point, he plays a 9-1-1 call in which Moore is apparently described as a "weapon"), and he gets in a couple of showy stunts, including a half-hearted attempt at a citizen's arrest. Whether those moments make you roll your eyes or clap your hands will depend on your tolerance for his usual schtick. And to his credit, Moore doesn't shy away from his own missteps, acknowledging that he went soft on Trump during a 1998 appearance on The Roseanne Show.

Moore saves some of his sharpest jabs, however, for the left – specifically, the Democratic establishment that he sees as more interested in "compromise" than in standing up for their constituents, as well as a mainstream media all too eager to follow them to the center. "The worst thing Barack Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump," says Moore, citing the former president's taste for drone strikes, mass deportation, and the imprisonment of whistleblowers.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is part exposé, part doomsday warning, and part call to arms, and the switch from one mode to another can be jarring. The most upsetting transition comes without warning or segue, as the film concludes a segment about unions and moves straight into footage from the Parkland shooting. Sensitive viewers will need to brace themselves.

For those already following the news, Fahrenheit 11/9 may not contain a whole lot in the way of brand-new information. But at a time when we're all teetering on the brink of emotional exhaustion and attention fatigue, there's something to be said for a movie that reignites our capacity to be angry and inspired.

The movie doesn't offer much specific instruction as to what we, the viewers, should do with those feelings. But Moore is successful in imparting the overwhelming sense that we must do something, and in emphasizing that ordinary citizens – like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the West Virginia teachers, and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas teens – can and do make a difference. The days of waiting in hope, clearly, are over.