Michael Moore: America's awkward liberal

The last time Michael Moore had a movie to promote, his 2004 Bush-bashing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, he manufactured a controversy on the eve of its premiere at the Cannes Festival accusing the Walt Disney Company of attempting to censor him for political reasons.

The accusation was almost entirely devoid of merit - Disney gave him a full year's notice that it did not want to distribute the film, and did nothing to prevent him finding another outlet, which he duly did. No matter: the stunt worked, the movie enjoyed a torrent of free publicity ahead of its commercial release, and went on to become the highest-grossing documentary in film history.

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Now Moore has a new documentary to plug, a denunciation of the US health care system called Sicko, and also a new controversy on his hands. This time the controversy is not being manufactured - or not by him, anyway. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department informed him he was under investigation for possible violations of the US trade embargo on Cuba because he travelled there with 10 rescue workers from New York's World Trade Center who have come down with respiratory ailments.

The letter has played straight into Moore's predilection for public indignation. And he has, predictably, made as much noise about it as possible. It seems the rescue workers were taken to Cuba to make a comparison between America's privately run health system and the public system established by Fidel Castro. Moore, though, is refusing to give details - all the better to heighten anticipation for the film's commercial release in the next two months.

Unlike 2004, when Moore did all the pot-stirring himself, this time he has had a little help from the former senator and possible Republican presidential candidate, Fred Thompson, who has taken the bait and publicly attacked Moore. Moore, in turn, has accused Thompson of hypocrisy because he has a long-standing fondness for Cuban cigars, which also fall under the US embargo.

It's hard to know how much of the back-and-forth is grandstanding for publicity purposes - Thompson has his own reasons to claim a little limelight as he ponders a White House run - and how much spells serious trouble. Moore insists he has done nothing wrong, but de-scribes the Treasury investigation as "hassle I can do without".

The episode emphasises how much of a lightning rod Moore is in American culture. The rotund, bearded 53-year-old, proud of his sloppy clothing and ever-present baseball cap, is beloved by a certain type of liberal who laps up his corporate-bashing, Republican-hating rhetoric and his sly sense of humour.

At the same time, he is loathed in equal measure by heartland Americans who don't share his politics and suspect he plays fast and loose with the facts in his not-so-subtle efforts to ram his points home. Websites have sprung up with the purpose of undermining anything that comes out of his mouth, and he is routinely demonised by talk-radio hosts and televangelists as the worst kind of wild-eyed, conspiracy-minded liberal .

What both sides fail to point out is that Moore is not, in the end, at his most effective as a political propagandist. He hoped Fahrenheit 9/11 would, single-handedly, wake up a dormant nation and thwart George Bush's re-election, which of course it did not. The reason the film did as well as it did - taking more than $200m (£101m) at the US box-office alone - is because it was richly entertaining almost despite its politics. The overwrought, over-emotional stance it took against the Iraq war wasn't half as memorable as the footage of Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defence and the war's chief ideological architect, spitting on his comb before running it through his hair.

The same was true of Moore's previous hit films. His diatribe against General Motors, Roger & Me (1989), did little to change the car industry; what remains memorable is his portrayal of a whole gallery of eccentrics and unwitting fools in and around his home town of Flint, Michigan. His anti-gun movie Bowling for Columbine, which won the 2003 Oscar for best documentary, produced a hilarious interview with a deranged James Nichols, brother of one of the Oklahoma City bombers, but a less hilarious interview with Charlton Heston, the actor turned leader of the National Rifle Association, whom he embarrassed until he squirmed.

It seems reasonable to assume, then, that Sicko will form part of the same pattern. If Moore's humour and interview technique remain intact, it will doubtless do brilliantly. Its prospects of provoking much-needed reform in the US health system seem a lot more distant, however.

It's a shame Moore continues to believe in himself as a political standard-bearer, not just a film-maker. That belief stems largely from his background as the rabble-rousing Irish Catholic son of a car industry worker in Flint - the town he comes back to in almost every film he makes.

From the moment he left school in Davison, a respectable suburb of Flint, he was stirring the political pot, becoming, in 1972, the youngest person ever elected to his local school board so he could force the principal and deputy principal of his high school to resign.

He went to the Flint branch of the University of Michigan, but dropped out to pursue a career in alternative journalism. After rising through the ranks in his home state, he moved to California in the mid-1980s and an editing position at the radical magazine Mother Jones. Here he alienated his colleagues and was fired. Moore sued for unfair dismissal, and while he received only a tiny fraction of the $2m he was seeking in a pre-trial settlement, he used the money to finance Roger & Me and launch his new career as a film-maker.

The rest, despite a lack of formal film training, has been almost uninterrupted success. He produced not one but two hit television shows in the 1990s, TV Nation and The Awful Truth, and churned out a series of comic political rants, including one, Stupid White Men (2001), that got him into a shouting match over censorship with his publishers, HarperCollins.

These days he lives in New York with his wife Kathleen, but returns regularly to his home state, where he runs a film festival in Traverse City. A rival festival in Flint takes great pleasure in snubbing him and showing works that seek specifically to attack him, but enjoys nowhere near the same success.

In 2003, as the Iraq war was starting, Moore caused a huge stir at the Oscars, denouncing George Bush as a "fictitious president" pursuing a "fictitious war".

In 2004, Moore hit the presidential campaign trail, organising a "slacker uprising tour" on campuses and giving away free noodles and underwear to anyone who registered to vote at his events. Again, his political impact was negligible, but he proved to be entertaining. With luck, with Sicko, we can expect to be richly entertained all over again.