This is the first weekend run for Michael Moore’s new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, his long-anticipated send up on Wall Street, the financial meltdown, the economy, and the not-so-free enterprise system. If you see it, feel free to share your view.

I  saw it Wednesday in the city. It was vintage MM—  lots of ironic humor, great cameos, the usual performance art stalkings of corporate bosses. (As you doubtless know by now, these scenes always end at corporate America’s revolving doors, at the unyielding stiff arm of security personnel, who are wiser these days, having seen this act in every other MM film.) Capitalism drew applause when the credits rolled, but I think it was Moore’s laziest work, especially given the target-rich environment.

In compelling fashion, MM strings together lots of disparate vignettes from history (especially from that unheralded “socialist” FDR—who knew?) and our modern-day troubles, to skewer an easy and flawed target—capitalism. That, however, is child’s play in the waning days of the Great Recession; who couldn’t do the same with one arm tied behind her back and a camcorder in the other?

Where Moore falls short is, in getting at the causes of our latest meltdown and how to prevent the next. Really, he doesn’t even try—at least not in a way that might advance anyone’s understanding of the problem. Instead, Moore pretty much goes with the mob mentality—the same one that almost doomed the bailout of the financial system (medicine without which the rest of the economy would have gone the way of Lehman Brothers); the same one that surely would have killed off the last of the auto workers for whom Moore has such uncritical affection and allegiance; the same one that might well doom health-care reform, the subject of another Moore treatment.

How lazy was Moore? He lets more than one member of Congress go on about secret and mysterious doings in Washington aimed at stealing our collective bacon, while ignoring a good bit of the public policy mistakes—committed IN THE OPEN—that most thoughtful analysts point to as catalysts for our misery. This work has already been done for Moore, but he opts for the vague conspiracy. The trouble with that: we can target and fix public policy mistakes—and we have a responsibility to do so—but when the focus is on mysterious conspiracies and unseen forces, well, that’s just an invitation to chase our tails. That lets us—and the policy-makers—off the hook.

If you really want to learn something about the economic mess, there’s a better alternative this weekend. Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life has a follow-up piece on last year’s The Giant Pool of Money, perhaps the best explanatory journalism on what went wrong. Here’s the link to Return to the Giant Pool of Money.

It might make you want to join the mob and go shopping for pitchforks.