Oh, the audacity

IN Hollywood these days, burly guys like "Knocked Up's" Seth Rogen have all the heat. But no one casts a weightier shadow in the cultural zeitgeist than Michael Moore. A lightning rod for controversy, a canny self-promoter and a gifted filmmaker, Moore has been hard to avoid in recent days as he's crisscrossed the country beating the drums for "Sicko," popping up everywhere from "The Daily Show" to downtown L.A.'s skid row, where he hosted a "premiere" of the film.

A devastating dissection of the pitfalls of the U.S. healthcare system, the film opened Friday in limited release to largely admiring reviews and a warm reception at the box office. Half comedy, half muckraking horror film, "Sicko" offers testimony from regular folks who've had ruinous encounters with cold-hearted healthcare providers as well as a Moore-led pied-piper tour of countries whose healthcare systems appear shockingly better than ours.

At the center of the film, as always, is Moore. Like Bono, Spike Lee and George Clooney, he occupies that amorphous space in the pop culture given over to bold-faced names whose activism is indistinguishable from their celebrity. A walking inspiration for op-ed page pieces arguing the merits of his latest expose, Moore has, as Clifford Odets once said of Orson Welles, "a peculiarly American audacity."

What makes Moore so compelling is that he has a cultural magnetism that seduces us while simultaneously arousing our suspicion. It's an unusually combustible equation: Infuriate + Inspire = Ambivalence. Bill Clinton's entire presidency was consumed by it. Courtney Love had it for a minute, as did Oliver Stone. Terrell Owens and Barry Bonds have brought it to the playing fields. Love 'em, hate 'em, often all at the same time.

You need a big megaphone to make such a complicated impression. "Michael Moore is out there in the crowded streets of our culture, shouting 'Do you not see what's happening in our world?' " says Paul Greengrass, the acclaimed filmmaker of "United 93" and "The Bourne Supremacy" who, like Moore, started his career in journalism. "Complexity isn't his subject, is it? It's his fierce moral clarity. His subject is our world and its injustices."

Moore also reminds Greengrass of another larger-than-life filmmaker. "There is something Wellesian about him," he says. "He has this preposterous, overblown persona that you can't help but get involved with. He has the showmanship as well as the delight Welles had in getting a rise out of people. He's also a technically brilliant filmmaker, even if you sometimes wonder -- am I really getting the whole picture?"