“Michael Moore in TrumpLand” isn’t quite the film that I expected it to be, and that’s all to the good. Moore is, of course, a genius of political satire, deploying his persona—as a populist socialist skeptic with a superb sense of humor and a chess player’s skill at media positioning—to deeply humane ends that are mainly detached from practicality, policy, and practical politics. The very idea of the new film—a recording of Moore’s one-man show from the stage of a theatre in a small, predominantly Republican town in Ohio—runs the risk of self-parody, being a feature-length lampooning of Trump, laid out with meticulously researched facts set forth with the sublime derision of which Moore is a master. It would have been a highly saleable version of preaching to the converted.

Instead, Moore—a well-known and outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary campaign—has done something different, better, and even majestic. He has made a film that, at its frequent best, raises his own celebrity to a political object and transforms that celebrity into a mode of combative yet deeply empathetic practical politics, even turns it into a political weapon of the sort that’s seemingly ready-made to combat Trump, whose candidacy, after all, is itself purely a product of the celebrity industry.

Moore’s film—gestating for a year, made in twelve days, filmed on October 7th (four hours, Moore said in a Q. & A., after the Trump/Billy Bush tape broke), and completed on Tuesday morning, just hours before its première, at IFC Center—is centered on the Murphy Theatre, in Wilmington, Ohio, a site that, Moore notes in the film, is doubly ironic. First, Wilmington is the county seat of Clinton County; second, the theatre’s renovation had the financial backing of Glenn Beck. There, Moore brought together an audience of diverse political persuasions—Trump supporters, Clinton supporters, third-party supporters, and even nonvoters—and, in his way, sought, at different points in his highly performative talk, to address them all.

Moving between a podium, a desk, and an armchair on a stage decorated with mural-sized black-and-white photographs of Hillary Clinton in her younger days, Moore acknowledges the political diversity of the audience (not much ethnic diversity—almost everyone is white) and then yields to some easy political theatre—explaining that, to put Trump supporters at ease, the Mexicans in the audience are seated separately, in the balcony (and then placed behind a cardboard wall), as are the Muslims in attendance (who are kept under video surveillance by a drone flying above them). He jokes about Trump supporters by joking about liberals, mocking himself and his fellow-progressives as uncertain and deferential and praising conservatives for at least being “decisive, organized, and disciplined”—they get up at five in the morning, he says, while “we” only see 5 A.M. after a night of partying.

Then he gets to the heart of the matter, which has two parts. The first is to address Trump supporters from his own heart. He begins with a series of jokes addressing and warmly mocking “vagenda of manocide”-type masculine paranoia, culminating in jokes about the internment camps for men that would arise during a Clinton Presidency. But he then turns earnest and reads a text that, he says, he wrote that very day (and it’s actually handwritten)—one in which he addresses Trump supporters, “the dispossessed,” who are members of the “former middle class,” people who’ve lost jobs and health insurance, who may have lost their homes and their savings, and who, he says, have “lost everything but the right to vote.” Moore describes Trump as “the Molotov cocktail, the hand grenade thrown into the system that screwed them.” Moore acknowledges that many of Trump’s supporters are all the more motivated by the hatred that Trump arouses among the nation’s élites—the overlords of the institutions that have presided over these voters’ misery. He calls the prospect of a Trump Presidency “the biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history.” He then compares it to a similar recent electoral fuck-you: Brexit (“they used the ballot as an anger-management tool, and now they’re fucked”), and sees a Trump Presidency as a similar, though incomparably greater, disaster—the election of “the last American President.” (A comic video parody of a Trump inauguration doesn’t do much to add to the litany of Trump’s self-inflicted ridicule, however.)

Soon thereafter, Moore makes his way to the second part of his grand design. Having made the empathetic case for anger at the status quo, he sets out his case for Hillary Clinton. His idea is simple: what wins elections isn’t numbers per se but motivation, passion, enthusiasm. Clinton, he fears, won’t win, despite the polls, because Trump’s supporters are “decisive, organized, and disciplined,” and, what’s more, mad as hell. He makes clear that he never voted for Bill Clinton (Nader in ’96, he says), that he voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 primary and for Bernie Sanders this year, and he’s up-front about his particular political differences with Hillary Clinton. Then he gets rolling, and his blend of showman’s bravado and rhetorical flair is a thing of beauty.

Moore’s prime argument for Hillary is an argument from character. The first good thing that he can say about Hillary Clinton is that she likes him. He refers to the chapter “My Forbidden Love for Hillary” from his 1996 book “Downsize This!” and describes the White House dinner to which he was invited as a result—in particular, dwelling on the frank and surprisingly specific enthusiasm that Bill Clinton expressed for Moore’s work and the even greater show of enthusiasm with which Hillary followed it. The apparent element of vanity actually plays exactly in the opposite direction—what Moore’s doing here, deftly, is endowing Hillary with longstanding progressive bona fides, bringing her alongside him to share in his fan base.

Moore reinforces that point with a scintillating coup de théâtre: he refers to a scene in his film “Where to Invade Next,” in which he visits a hospital in Estonia to learn why the rate of mortality for women in childbirth is lower there than it is in the United States. While there, he says, he saw a picture on the wall, of Hillary Clinton and the hospital personnel, from the early nineteen-nineties—she was there, Moore says, for the same reason he was. Moore’s enthusiastic praise of Clinton’s health-care initiatives during her husband’s Presidency is matched by his righteous fury at its rejection, at the current state of affairs that deprives so many citizens of adequate health care.

Moore then pivots to his decisive point, a masterstroke of political psychology that he extracts from a sharp history lesson. Citing the personal attacks that Hillary endured while pushing for health care during Bill Clinton’s first Administration and the mockery that she bore for her unwillingness to play the traditional domestic role of a First Lady, he then goes back over her entire career to consider the attacks that she has borne—not over politics but as an ambitious and independent-spirited woman and as Bill Clinton’s wife, living with him in Arkansas and going against her principles to take his last name in the interest of his political career. Moore goes back to Hillary’s student days, playing a clip of her commencement address at her college graduation, and evokes the opposition that an entire generation of early feminists faced as they attempted to speak out for women’s equality at a time when sexual harassment and male prerogatives were utterly commonplace, unaddressed and unredressed.