The music hardly ever stops in “Manda Bala,” an eye-catching, ambitious documentary of crime, corruption, and upper- class coping methods in today’s economically split Brazil. Swaggering to sambas and other tropical rhythms, this prize-winning film resembles an edgy pseudo-political travelogue but claims to deliver the last, hard-hitting word on a beleaguered society. First-time filmmaker Jason Kohn lays bare some harrowing facts of Brazilian life, yet his myopic ideas and crass metaphors deliver less than meets the eye.

After a concertedly elliptical start, “Manda Bala” daisy-chains interrelated examples of Brazil’s perverse extremities: the kidnapping epidemic in São Paulo, a money-laundering frog farm up north, a plastic surgeon who specializes in reattaching ears severed by kidnappers, and the flagrantly self-enriching politician Jader Barbalho, who siphons off development grants meant for the poor. Later, a masked kidnapper joins the parade to testify about his tightly run business.

Adopting the increasingly common vernacular for developing nation chic, “Manda Bala” pulsates with color-saturated hues, blasting our eyes with the terrible beauty of vapid glass skyscrapers, vats full of frogs, and reconstructive surgery sessions. Mr. Kohn anchors his heady visuals with off-center interviews with a frog farmer, Mr. Barbalho’s prosecutors, a gung-ho cop, a kidnapping survivor, even Mr. Barbalho himself. Grainy footage of videotaped threats by kidnappers occasionally strafe the proceedings.

The hungry teeming frogs serve as Mr. Kohn’s shrill metaphor for the self-consuming, self-destructing Brazilian system of haves and have-nots. Much mention has been made of Mr. Kohn’s tutelage under the documentarian Errol Morris, and the frog fixation feels like an inferior lost chapter from Mr. Morris’s “Fast Cheap and Out of Control,” only without the view-askew shrewdness. (The droll hanging conclusions to Mr. Kohn’s interviews are another echo.)

And like Mr. Morris, Mr. Kohn aims to sort out underlying systems of order and little-known human practices, but the younger director is too fascinated with lurid surfaces to probe what lies beneath. One frequent interviewee, a businessman identified as “Mr. M” for his safety, is our upperclass proxy, bemoaning the deficiencies of bulletproof glass and occasioning exciting footage of a defensive driving course. The tearful kidnapping survivor balances this matter-of-fact urban warriorhood, recounting how she watched Alfred Hitchcock movies during her captivity when the television was left on to drown out her whimpering.

“Manda Bala” does convey the cycle of corruption begetting more corruption, and illustrates how daily life becomes a nightmarish mirror of horrific socioeconomic realities. In a city under siege, the service industry for the rich will spawn a huge private helicopter force, competing bulletproofing companies, and implanted chips for tracking kidnapping victims. And the brazen kidnapper who is interviewed outlines the larger state of affairs: People will steal by the gun, like him, or with the pen, like a politician.

Despite its knowing air and awareness of macabre absurdity, however, the film is hobbled by a cropped social perspective. Except for the kidnapper, Mr. Kohn doesn’t interview any of the poor people who form a crucial part of the country’s social equation (not to mention the majority of the population). This comes across as a palpable void in the film’s ideas and structure that even the fascinating near-futuristic levels of urban lunacy cannot obscure.

The director’s compromised judgment is also exposed in the repeated, ethically dubious deployment of the kidnapping videos. These periodic bulletins feature scenes like a masked assailant making fatal ultimatums or a terrified boy pleading with his parents, but the biggest shock comes with the fourth or fifth video: footage of an ear being sliced off, which Mr. Kohn lets run for the full length of the act.

Ironically, the cannibalism that is the film’s muddled metaphor by way of the frogs has held figurative significance in the past for Brazil. A well-known intellectual movement of the 1920s used the practice to posit the omnivorous consumption and reworking of cultural influences from home and abroad. And Mr. Kohn, a Long Island native with Brazilian roots, may have digested the wrong fodder: He has described his documentary as a “nonfiction ‘Robo-Cop.'”

A better model might have been Hubert Sauper’s 2005 globalism documentary “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which is equally visceral but far more penetrating and cogent. “Manda Bala” skillfully metes out gruesome thrills and hopeless chills, but sensation goes only so far with so grim a state of affairs.