The movie “2016: Obama’s America” is a work of propaganda that offers base innuendo in lieu of argument, but the parts of it that are authentically engaging and account for its slender cinematic appeal likely have as much to do with the film’s popularity as its anti-Obama message does. They’re also inseparable from the film’s most scurrilous insinuations. It’s the kind of personal production that calls into question the very virtue of sincerity: I’d think better of its master-thinker and preëminent presence, Dinesh D’Souza (who co-wrote and directed it with John Sullivan), if the movie gave cause to believe that he was merely mouthing a prepared campaign line rather than expressing his actual viewpoints. But his representation of ingenuous sincerity—the perversion and distortion of the notion of a personal movie—is the film’s starting point and the governing concept of its structure.

In the movie, D’Souza (adapting his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) accuses the President of sharing the anticolonialist doctrine of his father, Barack Obama Sr., and of planning to weaken and impoverish the United States in furtherance of that doctrine. He suggests that Obama didn’t act more directly to these ends in his first term because of the need to get reëlected, but that, if he does, the mask will drop and Obama, having bamboozled many American voters, will put his nefarious plan into motion. D’Souza turns Obama into a political version of Putney Swope (the title character of Robert Downey, Sr.,’s 1969 satire)—depicts him as a mild-mannered, inoffensive, apparently liberal black man whose rise to high office is due to his ability to show an innocuous face to whites but who, as soon as he rules unchecked by them, will morph into a radical Third World Soul Brother Number One. And what casts these outrageous assertions and suggestions in a simulated light of documentary authority is the onscreen reporter, D’Souza, who presents himself as a sort of Obama surrogate or Obama double, revealing his similarities to Obama in order to assert his intellectual and moral authority on the subject.

From the start, D’Souza appears as a scholarly and earnest presence with a calm and fluting voice, telling his own story as an immigrant to the United States. He speaks of his own family in his native India and his experiences as a foreign student at Dartmouth. I’m an absolute sucker for personal stories and when D’Souza delivers his own, I want to hear it. He says that as a teen-ager in India, he got the chance to study at Dartmouth—where he was bewildered to find white American students embracing (albeit abstractly) the India that he had left behind and where he became an editor of an attention-grabbing conservative student journal. There’s a whole movie in his ellipses, and it’s one I’d pay to see. For that matter, the account of his public debate, in 1985, against Reverend Jesse Jackson on the subject of whether America is a racist society may be one-sided, but he frames his side of the argument in personal terms that, while not necessarily persuasive, are sympathetic enough to induce curiosity about the path of experience and thought that he followed in his youth—the account is surprisingly undogmatic.

Dogma is coming, of course, and, when it does, it drops like a sinker (with the Randian code word “collectivism”). It arrives with the long-familiar dose of guilt by association (with Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Edward Said, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger), as well as by the newly adduced association (largely psychological, hardly direct) with Obama’s father. (It’s comical to see the psychologist Paul Vitz contradict D’Souza on the subject of an absent father’s influence, until D’Souza, pretending not to hear, feeds him a leading question that, like an ill-constructed poll, elicits the desired response). For that matter, Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, comes under fire for what the filmmaker calls her own anticolonial, anti-business, and anti-anti-Communism principles, and her father is damned for being “on the left.” Even the President’s native Hawaii—in particular, the prestigious Punahou School, from which he graduated—is depicted as a hotbed of anticolonial resentment.

But the real scandal of this movie isn’t the resuscitation of charges of closet radicalism by association. It’s the film’s racial angle, capped by two centerpieces: D’Souza’s trip to Kenya in search of Obama’s roots (the President’s father died thirty years ago), and the filmmaker’s conversation (by cell phone, though filmed and recorded) with the conservative writer Shelby Steele. What frames these sequences, and sets the tone for the entire film, is D’Souza’s comparison of Obama with himself. He draws parallels (curious though insignificant) between them: born the same year, graduated from college the same year, married the same year. His self-representation as a grateful American, one who, having arrived as an immigrant, acknowledges the country’s singular virtues, serves as an easy contrast with Obama, who is supposedly an anti-colonialist, anti-Western, anti-American, and, for that matter, anti-white—in short, an ingrate.

D’Souza, no birther, takes care to affirm that Obama was born in Hawaii. But in spending so much screen time digging among Obama’s very roots in Kenya and so much energy connecting Obama with a father who left the United States to return to there is the better to inveigh against the West. And digging, too, in Indonesia, D’Souza makes the President come off as a virtual foreigner who, though technically born here, has the mind-set of an immigrant—and who ought to have the consciousness and conscience of an immigrant like D’Souza himself. D’Souza does his best to make Obama seem insufficiently American at heart. The Kenya he depicts is alienating—he sought to speak with Obama’s so-called Grandma Sarah, actually one of his polygamous grandfather’s five wives, who, when she decided she didn’t want to speak with D’Souza on camera, got local heavies involved and D’Souza and crew, feeling intimidated, left. D’Souza implicitly contrasts American prosperity with African poverty, American freedom with African thuggery, and American Christianity with African paganism (and, in his footage from Indonesia, with Islam). Images of ramshackle huts, wildlife, and dirt roads—and others of urban swarm and headscarved women in Indonesia—evoke what D’Souza’s voice only hints at. And, by comparison, it’s D’Souza, the actual immigrant, who comes off as the more authentic, legitimate, and representative American.

For D’Souza, to be an American is to have an apt relationship to whites. The heavy lifting of racial politics is done by Steele, who, explaining that he, too, is the child of an interracial couple, describes, in terms of his own experience, the black person’s strategy for being liked by whites (avoiding seeming angry). But in asserting that Obama owes his rise to being “helped” by whites, he replicates another repellent stereotype, that of the dependent black person who lives off white people’s bounty and guilt. D’Souza implies that Obama was elected as a balm to that guilt and came to office as an empty symbol and an unexamined quantity, whose tendencies and deepest principles—whose concealed anger—have been held in check by the prospect of reëlection. As for the actual state of race relations in America—the movie offers not a word about it; the actual politics of immigration—nothing.

But the tissue of insinuations is just a long backstory for the hectic and apocalyptic vision that bursts out toward the end, when, in a piece of political science fiction, D’Souza envisions the diminished America that he thinks Obama plans to leave behind at the end of his second term—one that would differ radically with the America that D’Souza loves and that he himself, he suggests, represents. I still wonder if he really thinks so—but he doesn’t seem ready to wonder; he has no questions for himself, and that’s the movie’s greatest failure.

P.S. At the nearly empty Upper East Side movie theatre where I caught “2016,” the screen seemed on-message even before the movie began, starting with a slide exhorting viewers to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s planned ban on double-blubber super-gulp soft drinks (“freedom,” it said, is at stake) and continuing with an ad for “Atlas Shrugged: Part II” and trailers for “Argo” (the advance word is excellent; the subject is a rescue of Americans from the Iranian revolution) and “The Hobbit” (with its Christian neo-medievalism). Suddenly Clint Eastwood’s claim about Hollywood’s horde of hidden conservatives seemed less absurd.