Michael Moore made himself extremely famous with a 1989 campaigning documentary feature film called Roger and Me, in which he passionately expounded on the devastation wrought by General Motors (GM) on his home town of Flint, Michigan. He became, almost immediately, the American left’s favourite person after Jane Fonda – uncompromisingly blue-collar Midwest with his baseball cap and jeans and diet of junk food, uncompromisingly radical but also incredibly (for a leftie) funny.

The narrative thread of Roger and Me hinged upon Moore’s increasingly desperate attempts to confront Roger Smith, the CEO of GM, and being continually snubbed and manhandled by the firm’s security goons. The message of the film, then, was of an unseen, ruthless and insouciant CEO who couldn’t be arsed to face the evidence of his policy of abandoning the Michigan communities which had helped make his firm the richest in the world.

This, as Roger Rapoport reveals in this delightfully catty biography, was some distance from the truth. Far from avoiding Moore, Smith met him on three occasions and was interviewed, on camera, twice. But the footage ended up on the cutting-room floor at Moore’s insistence because the reality of it failed to square with the point of the film. Further, once the film was out, Moore allegedly persuaded colleagues and former colleagues to perpetuate the lie that he had never met Smith. And he left behind a wake of discontent among the auto-workers in Flint (who felt they had been sold down the river by Moore’s sensationalist approach) and by producers and researchers who found Moore “impossible” to work with and, as one of them puts it, “more interested in me than we”.

The picture we get, then, is of an at times unscrupulous, overambitious, often incompetent and always arrogant hybrid of journalist and comedian, with a monstrous ego. His former manager, who also seems to hate him, describes him contemptuously as a “vaudevillian”. Rapoport marshals a parade of disgruntled former associates and employees to fling the ordure; the grievances are endless and sometimes of marginal significance. I am not certain we should worry too much about the complaints from John Derevlany, who dressed in a giant chicken costume for Moore’s weekly show TV Nation and found the outfit a bit on the warmish side. “It could get over 100 degrees in there. I couldn’t take it,” he whined. Moore told him, rightly, to “chill”.

BACKGROUND

• Sicko review

• Weinstein braces for backlash

• Moore is wrong about the NHS

• Ministering to the Sicko

BACKGROUND

• Moore in hot water for Cuba trip

• Citizen Moore

• Moore's ill wind blows over political agenda

• Review: America: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore

• Tables turned on Fahrenheit 9/11’s maker

Just how good is Mr Good Guy?

Michael Moore is misleading, vain, irritating, greedy, hypocritical, pointless and ineffective. Or is he?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

But there’s enough here to make fans of Moore – of which I am one – wonder a little, at least. And plenty in which his many enemies on the left and the right might revel. Moore has made a lucrative career from exposing social injustice and making people laugh at the same time. But there is also quite a bit of money to be made out of kicking the man himself. Rapoport almost blames Moore for that greatest of all evils, the Bush presidency, given the journalist’s support for Ralph Nader, the Green candidate, who split the left vote.

The truth would seem to be that Moore needs a decent editor, someone to stop him riding roughshod over colleagues and twisting the facts to fit his stories; but also that he is a very clever, dynamic and fearless journalist and persuasive to boot – “a man who could have talked Hitler into holding a barmitzvah”, as one former colleague put it. And that film on GM got the job done: Smith lasted just one more year at the firm.

Citizen Moore: The Making of an American Iconoclast by Roger Rapoport

Methuen £8.99 pp312

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £8.54 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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