“Suburbicon,” a jaundiced, hard-sell comedy, wants you to know that the American dream was always a crock. This may not be news, even in the movie industry, which loves white-picket fences in principle but remains a gated community in fact. Still, every so often a filmmaker restates the case for the prosecution. The latest complainant is George Clooney, who in directing “Suburbicon” has turned back the clock to the 1950s for a story about the good old American days of prosperity and prejudice, of race hate and white people who are always just one clenched fist away from becoming a mob.

The title refers to the ticky-tacky Potemkin suburb where it all goes down. You know the place: It’s as American as apple pie and quiet desperation. It’s the post-World War II wasteland with the identical homes, lawns and faces that has been grist for critique and caricature, novels and movies, ever since suburbs were invented. In “Little Boxes,” a 1960s lament about conformity, Pete Seeger warbles about that sprawling wasteland, where all the “boys go into business and marry and raise a family.” That these little boxes look a lot like coffins gives his song the tenor of a dirge, one that “Suburbicon” delivers anew with cruel laughter, violent enthusiasm and acres of dark-wood paneling.

Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, some kind of executive who has his own office and secretary at work and a wife, Rose (Julianne Moore), and son, Nicky (a good, appealing Noah Jupe), at home. It all looks neat and tidy, especially Suburbicon, a planned community dotted with houses as square as Gardner’s sack suits and yards that look as if they’d been landscaped using a compass and protractor. There are a few midcentury modern flourishes, but the sheer, overriding, bland whiteness underscores that this entire world has been drawn along the antiseptic lines of a period sitcom like “Father Knows Best” rather than a riposte like “Mad Men.”

The story opens just as the Mayerses, Suburbicon’s first black family, move into the area, an event the neighborhood treats as a collective home invasion. Women whisper and stare, men sputter and rage, and soon all their white faces have gone red. Before long, unneighborly clusters begin gathering around the family’s home, edging around the perimeter and transforming it into a kind of stage. And then the fences go up, and the clusters develop into a pack. The whispers morph into jeers, and the progressively, dangerously impatient crowd howls for the show to begin. Any resemblance to the audience watching “Suburbicon” is as intentional as it is obvious.