Bill Talen is talking on the phone from Southern California, driving between press events in a crowded car and describing his determination to strip Christmas of its unchecked consumerist mentality, when he suddenly bursts into song: “Back away from buying!” he screams into the phone, the lyrics distorting. “The right wing! Dreads progressive thinking!”

“Hallelujah!” he exclaims, then moves on to verse two.

It’s a giddy change of pace from the serious, sober conversation he was just having, in which he elaborated on all the ways America has become lost in this era of spending money, racking up debt, and shopping to the death.

“No one in the world has more stuff around than Americans,” he says. “We’re crowded out by stuff — our neighbors have stuff, we’ve got stuff up and down the stairs, our Dumpsters are full of stuff. We’ve got to stop this. Our solution cannot be to get into traffic and to travel between one box store and another because we feel guilty about not shopping. You don’t have to buy a gift to give a gift.”

For years, Mr. Talen, better known as the Rev. Billy, has preached this gospel across the country. Many New Yorkers have seen him spread the word in Times Square. Others may even have attended one of his Sunday afternoon “revivals” at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea, where he takes to the pulpit, backed by a volunteer choir in red robes, and exorcises the demons from both credit cards and their holders.

Still others have read the news coverage of one of his many arrests, as he has made a spectacle at any number of Starbucks locations, where he performs exorcisms on the cash registers, or outside Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. Next week, to commemorate the nationwide shopping spree that follows Thanksgiving (Rev. Billy hopefully calls it “buy nothing day”), he’ll be outside Macy’s in Herald Square, screaming to gathered shoppers to turn back, to save “Christmas from the shopacolypse!”

It was during one of these public performances, Mr. Talen said, that he first crossed paths with Morgan Spurlock, a New York film student who would eventually go on to fame with his 2004 documentary “Super Size Me.” Together, Messrs. Talen and Spurlock, along with Savitri D, the director of Rev. Billy’s choir, set out to hire a director (Rob VanAlkemade) to make a film about Rev. Billy, his unusual Church of Stop Shopping, and a meticulously staged, cross-country protest tour that would give the Reverend a national platform on which to spread the good word.

The resulting film, “What Would Jesus Buy?,” arrives in New York today, composed as a mishmash of sensational protests and serious discussions about how Americans are becoming more reliant on credit cards, more defined by their possessions, and more ambivalent about the ways in which big-box stores are squeezing out small businesses.

“We have so many brilliant commentators in the movie, from Bill McKibben to others, but we also wanted to make a movie that, for the first time, gave shoppers the opportunity to finally talk to each other,” Mr. Talen said. “If you watch people shop, they talk very little in a big-box store, they get dazzled and there’s the Muzak. The products get to talk, the shoppers don’t get to talk. So a big part of this was that we wanted to point the camera at shoppers and ask, ‘What do you want Christmas to be?’ and I think it’s interesting that it really has very little to do with buying things.”

As captured by Mr. VanAklemade, these street-side interviews lend the film its clearest voice. In one scene, we meet a mother who receives credit card offers in the mail which she then turns around and maxes out by that very evening, determined to give her children the gift-filled Christmas morning that she never had as a child — all the while keeping the charge bill a secret from her husband. Another sequence asks older shoppers to recall their favorite childhood holidays, and one tearful consumer recalls how it was little more than a piece of fruit each Christmas that meant the world to her — the tiniest of offerings during the most difficult days of the Depression.

Its noble instincts duly noted, “What Would Jesus Buy?” stumbles wildly when it moves away from the typical citizen and returns to its performer-in-chief. Rev. Billy’s Wal-Mart protests feel painfully staged, performed less for shoppers than for the cameras. Another rapid-fire sequence, showing Billy’s many assaults on Starbucks locations, fails to show us the reactions of customers and whether they register this chaos as anything more than an interruption of their afternoon coffee. Cutting back and forth between seconds-long snippets of the Reverend’s stage show, we’re denied the chance to absorb the hysteria of his stage persona.

But ironically, Mr. Talen might be just fine with this analysis — that it’s the people who shine brighter in his custom-tailored movie than his own, carefully configured, anti-shopping visage. Some of these shoppers represent the problem, woefully detached from what they are buying and clueless as to how their freewheeling lifestyle of charge cards, financing, and identity-through-brands has become a sickness. But others represent the “solution.” They are dismayed at the plastic greed that has infected what we know of Christmas.

ssnyder@nysun.com