Both American political parties are indicted; “Inside Job” is not simply another belated settling of accounts with Mr. Bush and his advisers, though they are hardly ignored. The scaling back of government oversight and the weakening of checks on speculative activity by banks began under Reagan and continued during the Clinton administration. And with each administration the market in derivatives expanded, and alarms about the dangers of this type of investment were ignored. Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, presented a paper in 2005 warning of a “catastrophic meltdown” and was mocked as a “Luddite” by Mr. Summers.

Meanwhile, some investment bankers — at Goldman Sachs in particular — were betting against the positions they were pushing on their customers. An elaborate house of cards had been constructed in which bad consumer loans were bundled into securities, which, were certified as sound by rating agencies paid by the banks and then insured via credit-default swaps. One risky bet was stacked on top of another, and in retrospect the collapse of the whole edifice, along with the loss of jobs, homes, pensions and political confidence, seems inevitable.

How did this happen? Mr. Ferguson is no conspiracy theorist; nor is he inclined toward structural or systemic explanations. Markets are not like tectonic plates, shifting on their own. Visible hands write laws and make deals, and in this case a combination of warped values and groupthink seems to have driven very intelligent men (and they were mostly men) toward folly. In addition to business and government, Mr. Ferguson aims his critique at academia, suggesting that the discipline of economics and more than a few prominent economists were corrupted by consulting fees, seats on boards of directors and membership in the masters of the universe club.

When he challenges some of these professors, in particular those who held positions of responsibility in the White House or in the Federal Reserve, they are reduced to stammering obfuscation — Markets are complicated! Who could have predicted? I don’t see any conflict of interest — and occasionally provoked to testiness. Mr. Ferguson, for his part, cannot always contain his incredulity or rein in his sarcasm. Occasionally his voice pipes up from off camera, saying things like, “You can’t be serious!”

But it is hard to imagine a movie more serious, and more urgent, than “Inside Job.” There are a few avenues that might have been explored more thoroughly, in particular the effects of the crisis on ordinary, non-Wall-Street-connected workers and homeowners. The end of the film raises a disturbing question, as Mr. Damon exhorts viewers to demand changes in the status quo so that the trends associated with unchecked speculation of the kind that caused the last crisis — rising inequality, neglect of productive capacity, endless cycles of boom and bust — might be reversed.

This call to arms makes you wonder why anger of the kind so eloquently expressed in “Inside Job” has been so inchoate. And through no fault of its own, the film may leave you dispirited as well as enraged. Its fate is likely to be that of other documentaries: praised in some quarters, nitpicked in others and shrugged off by those who need its message most. Which is a shame.

“Inside Job” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some drug and sex references and pervasive obscenity, though not the verbal kind.