“Maxed Out,” James Scurlock’s documentary about the American way of debt, suffers from the usual problem with political documentaries these days: a surfeit of targets. The explosion of consumer credit would have been a subject well worth looking at on its own, but Mr. Scurlock piles on political corruption, corporate greed, bad accounting practices, the bankruptcy laws, credit reporting bureaus, the religious right, campaign finance, deficit spending, and income inequality. Even the Iraq war gets a mention or two.

In other words, if you look at it in strictly political terms, the film also has too few targets. In fact, only one. Like Michael Moore and others on the bumper-sticker left, “Maxed Out” too often succumbs to the temptation of assuming that a world of problems would simply disappear if only George W. Bush were not president.

This assumption is the identifying mark of political unseriousness, whether in a politician, a journalist, or a filmmaker. However poor his performance in office, Mr. Bush has much less power over events than his enemies give him credit for, and the debt problem is like many of the others we face — including even Iraq — in that they have roots that long predate the 2000 election.

Not only is Mr. Scurlock guilty of political oversimplification, but his political agenda blinds him to some of the real and much more interesting social causes of the phenomena he adumbrates. He never mentions, for example, the subject of shame.

Within living memory, loan sharks were classed in the popular imagination with pimps, prostitutes, pornographers, drug dealers, gamblers, and others who made a living out of preying upon the weak. Now such people, with the possible and only partial exception of drug dealers, are glorified by the popular culture instead of being made to feel ashamed. State governments have taken over from the numbers racket as the chief purveyors of gambling opportunities to the poorest and most vulnerable.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that, as “Maxed Out” demonstrates, so many of the most respectable banks and other good corporate citizens now depend on something close to loan-sharking for the lion’s share of their profits — and that they are quite brazen about admitting it?

At one point, Mr. Scurlock appears to think he has coaxed a damaging confession from a couple of raffish debt-buyers — or duns, as they used to be called — who compare themselves to pirates, walking their hapless victims out to the edge of the plank until they cough up, then walking them back. He even provides a humorous illustration of the process with a clip from an old pirate movie.

Yet he never notices what would have seemed to almost anyone only a few years ago to be the most striking thing about the comparison: the fact that the pirates are proud to be pirates. Well, why shouldn’t they be? As the family-friendly Walt Disney Company would attest, there is an incredible amount of money to be made by casting pirates in heroic roles. Who’s ever taught these people that being a pirate, any more than being a debtor, is wrong or shameful?

In all the many tales of woe that “Maxed Out” seeks to milk for their undeniable pathos, it never once breathes a word of censure against those who have got themselves into serious debt trouble. The film’s model is the therapeutic one that now also applies to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, and an ever lengthening list of other human frailties. Debt is a form of addiction.

Fair enough, we may say. But if there is no moral dimension to becoming a debtor, why should we suppose that there is one to becoming a creditor, even a predatory one?

If, in other words, it’s morally unproblematic to supply the susceptible with such other instruments of self-harm, or even self-destruction, as alcohol, drugs, sex, and games of chance, why not credit, too?

Another of Mr. Scurlock’s touches of humor comes in periodic clips from an educational film of the 1950s in which a respectable-looking, white-haired old gent called “Mr. Money” instructs two high school-aged kids about responsible attitudes toward assuming debt.

As with any filmic reference to people who look like Mr. Money and talk in that stilted, 1950s-era documentary manner, the subtext is one of ridicule for their uptightness and artificiality.

Yet what has “Maxed Out” got to offer instead of such old-fashioned moralism? Nothing but, by implication, the exhortation to vote Democratic. If Mr. Scurlock thinks that’s going to solve the problem, he is as gullible as the pathetic creatures he showcases in his film.