Flint, Michigan loses nearly 30,000 jobs when General Motors closes its factories and moves production to Mexico, even as the company posts record profits. Michael Moore, a Flint native, turns the camera on his hometown and on his own quixotic quest to get GM chairman Roger Smith to walk the shuttered plant floor with him and see what the closures did to the city. Moore never gets his sit-down interview, so the film accumulates instead: a sheriff's deputy evicting families days before Christmas, a woman selling rabbits as 'pets or meat,' Miss Michigan touring the unemployment line, and Flint boosters staging a Great Gatsby-themed gala while laid-off workers queue at the blood bank. Moore narrates in the flat, sardonic voice that would become his trademark, cutting between corporate press events and the wreckage they left behind. It is less a balanced inquiry than an argument, but the argument is built entirely from footage of one city absorbing a decision made somewhere else.