Maybe Richard Dawkins should be flattered: the evolutionist is the first British boffin in living memory to warrant his own Hollywood-funded documentary. Yet he just raises an eyebrow and snorts.

Okay, so Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an anti-evolution documentary released in America this weekend, timed as an ironic salute to Charles Darwin’s birthday, casts Dawkins as a hate-monger, an academic boot boy – and the most dangerous Briton since George III. Yet such controversy should help sell a few more copies of The God Delusion, surely? Dawkins, provoked, still cannot bring himself to name Expelled’s writer, Ben Stein. “That man,” he sizzles quietly, “That man is... well, it’s just nonsense.”

Minutes later, when Dawkins addresses 3,000 fans cheering him to the rafters of Arizona State University, on the first night of his rock’n’roll-style God Delusion University Tour 2008, he waxes more poetic: “Were there ever a dog that praised his fleas?” he asks elliptically, quoting WB Yeats.

Ben Stein is one big flea, however, and, to tangle the metaphors further, a man with a bee in his bonnet. Indeed, a bee with a mission – to prove that American academics are being expelled from universities for daring to suggest that creationism should be taught in science classes. And that creationism, the belief that God created everything in six days, and on the seventh man cavorted with dinosaurs – a creed accepted by 80% of Americans and, lest we be smug, 10% of Britons – is the only riposte to Darwinism. And its links to, in Stein’s narrative, “communism, the Berlin Wall, the Holocaust and planned parenthood”. One might think it’s a joke if the movie were not opening across 1,000 screens, billed as “the most controversial film of the year”.

Until now, Stein, 63, has been best known as the actor playing an unnamed economics teacher in the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who monotoned his way through the class register in the hope someone would answer his weary plea: “Bueller... Bueller... Bueller...” Stein parlayed that moment of youth-culture cool into Win Ben Stein’s Money, a television panel game where contestants competed for a share of his $5,000-a-show salary, and a less successful follow-up involving his late and much beloved dog. It was all very jolly. Yet, like many comedians, Stein has always felt he was too smart merely to clown, and he has some credentials to prove it. He studied law at Yale alongside Hillary Clinton and, like her, graduated with a mission to help the poor. Instead, by a simple twist of fate, he ended up writing speeches for President Nixon.

Stein went to school in Silver Spring, Maryland – clearly an American version of Stella Street in the early 1960s, as his schoolmates included not only Sylvester Stallone and Goldie Hawn but Carl Bernstein, one of the Water-gate journalists who brought Nixon down.

Stein was always a contrarian: rather than join the mob praising the exposure of Nixon’s political corruption, he blamed the journalists for the Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields” genocide – because Nixon, if he had been left in power untroubled by public scrutiny, would have prevented the atrocities. What did Bernstein do to him in school?

A few years ago, with television ratings sliding and creationist museums opening across America, Stein came to the conclusion that the greatest threat to the country’s righteous empire were the Darwin-ists, whom he credited with the same world-shaping omnipresence that previous generations awarded to Jesuits, Jews and Freemasons. The next step was to turn his noisy thesis into a movie: the well-connected broadcaster found it relatively easy to raise the $3.5m budget with the help of think-tanks such as the Discovery Institute. It seems to specialise in aggressively maintaining that its prophets are martyrs to secularism while metaphorically book-burning. A neat trick.

It helped that Hollywood money men still recall the hard maths of Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which cost $6m and earned $119m at the American box office alone. Documentaries are relatively cheap to shoot, easy to market – whether it’s green cars or what went wrong in Iraq, believers are happy to see their ideas on screen – and sell well to American libraries, which buy documentary DVDs to appear hip.

This weekend, Expelled opens to a broadside of controversy claiming it’s not just one-sided, similar to all the Moore school of “Take no prisoners, bother no facts” polemics, but also fraudulent in its interviews and methodology – a heavy charge against a film that sets out to expose academic dishonesty. Scientists featured in the film say they were edited into silliness. This, too, is predictable: Sacha Baron Cohen is still dealing with the legal fallout from Borat. However, critics say Expelled takes “truthiness”, where truth is what special interests want it to be, to a whole new level.

The first shots of the film were taken at the idyllic Pacific campus of Pepperdine, a private university in Malibu. The university smelt a rat when, as cameras rolled, Stein addressed extras as if they were awestruck students. “Our students are largely Christian, but they largely accept evolution – not creationism, as the film shows,” said a Pepperdine official.

Stein interviewed the Pepperdine graduate Michael Shermer, a former creationist, now editor of Skeptic magazine, claiming he was working on a film called Crossroads, which would “explore where science and religion meet” – the kind of liberal mush that wins the annual Templeton prize for those endlessly seeking to square the circle of dogma and science. Shermer was thrown when Stein asked him if it was right to fire someone for promoting “academic freedom”, such as pushing creationism in science classes. His startled response made the film, but little else did. “It was dishonest, especially serious in a film attacking scientific honesty,” Shermer said.

Stein does not attempt to detail the logic of creationism, instead focusing on half a dozen academics who claim their beliefs disrupted their professional upward mobility. Looking at them, though, you can think of other reasons why maybe they crashed and burnt.

Amazingly, Stein got to Dawkins and edited the face-to-face interview to make the Oxford don look dumb, including when he admits that nobody knows how life started on earth. Luckily, big-brained Ben does. Was it Dawkins’s belief in British fair play or intellectual vanity that led him to entertain Stein? It was probably a naive move, either way.

The film’s producers, meanwhile, have refused to test Expelled with critics, instead arranging shows for friendly audiences, such as the governor of Mis-souri. He wants biblical accounts of creationism taught in schools, but not similar tales from the Koran – “freedom” has its limits.

A few days ago, Dawkins, perhaps secretly relishing his traditional Hollywood role as a British cinematic villain, did get to see the film, in a rollicking night that mixed farce with irony. He went along to a public screening in Minneapolis with a friend, Professor Paul Myers of the University of Minnesota Morris, who not only appears in the film, albeit briefly, but is also thanked in the credits.

A producer of the film, however, spotted the American biology prof in the queue and got security guards to escort him from the cinema because he was “not welcome”.

Dawkins, meanwhile, strolled in and, when the “shoddy and boring” film ended, stirred up the absurdity of the expulsion at Expelled’s question-and-answer session with the producers.

It was, said one blogger, as if Beelzebub himself had arisen in a puff of smoke in the temple. People left the film crossing themselves. “And that was a lot more fun than the film itself.”

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