The Canadian documentary “Radiant City” is an urgent dispatch from the new suburbia of bleak McMansions, of residents oozing loneliness while trapped in eternal traffic jams, and of unsupervised children playing with guns in permanent construction sites. If ever there was a propaganda film to make the residents of New York City feel happier about their crowded, expensive urban lifestyle, “Radiant City” is it.

From “Ordinary People” to “American Beauty,” bashing the suburbs has long been a popular pastime in movies, but it started out as clean, frothy fun. The 1904 film “The Suburbanite” is a short about a family moving into its new suburban home and the wacky troubles encountered therein Buster Keaton’s 1920 short, “One Week,” takes a marginally more caustic view, focusing on a young couple who receive an instant house only to watch it fall apart al most immediately. The 1948 Cary Grant and Myrna Loy flick, “Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House,” is a gentle ode to the frustrations and eventual joys of the suburban lifestyle.

But as the postwar generation settled down and thousands of massive just-add-water communities sprang up across the country things got darker. Joe Sarno made “Sin in the Suburbs” in 1962, then followed it with a stream of suburban-set, sin-soaked soft-core flicks. Meanwhile, novelists such as John Cheever and Sloan Wilson were exposing the shocking doings of suburban life in scandalous bestsellers, and Ira Levin was introducing readers to “The Stepford Wives.” Suddenly the suburbs were where housewives became desperate, where children pined for something useful to do — where the American dream had become a cookie-cutter night mare. In 1979 things came to a boil with “Over the Edge,” Jonathan Kaplan’s story (starring Matt Dillon in his first role) about teens trapped in a planned community who run riot and destroy their town.

The suburban sprawl, whose anonymous exteriors hide dark secrets, was already a cliché by the late 1970s, but “Over the Edge” didn’t blame the people who lived in the suburbs — it blamed the suburbs, suggesting that poor urban planning could transform normal people into psychopaths. In the early 1980’s, movies like “The Amityville Horror” and “Poltergeist,” posited that it was the very ground itself that was cursed, while later 1980s fare like “Suburbia” and “River’s Edge” chronicled children gone wild, emotionally mutilated by the suburban geography. Writer J.G. Ballard carried this idea to its logical conclusion with 1988’s “Running Wild,” about a gated community that mutates its resident children into a vile new life-form, hungry for murder.

As predictable as all this suburb bashing may be, pop culture has latched onto an essential truth: A sick city can make sick people. The sacred bible of the new suburbs is Le Corbusier’s 1935 “Radiant City” manifesto, which advocated dividing cities into separate zones for living, work, and relaxation. Corbusier had few chances to transform his theories into practice, but they have had a corrosive influence, inspiring suburbs built solely for living, where street after street of houses are erected with no sidewalks, no stores, and no community space. With no public transport, the residents of these enormous, isolated homes become almost entirely dependent on their cars.

This “architectural nervous breakdown” is the fodder for “Radiant City,” a collaborative documentary by the filmmaker Gary Burns and the journalist Jim Brown that works more like a slideshow of hell than a probing documentary. Focusing on a planned community in Calgary, the film (despite an ill-advised, self-reflexive critique of the documentary form in its last few minutes) gives a compelling look at the world we’re constructing for ourselves.

“Eighty percent of everything ever built in North America has been built in the last 50 years and most of it is brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading,” the gadfly James Howard Kunstler observes, and this is exactly what we see as Joey Santiago’s hypnotic loops of guitar noise shimmer across the soundtrack: identical houses reaching to the horizon, where cell phone towers have replaced trees and parking lots have replaced green fields.

At the center of the film is one family, the Mosses, and they are almost too perfect. The husband is participates in a local musical called “Suburbs: the Musical” and his wife feels like he blames her for their move to the half-constructed community. A tight schedule, two abnormally cynical kids, and the pressures of being filmed stretch their frayed nerves until they snap.

Unfortunately, the end of the documentary reveals that much of what we’ve seen may have been scripted, which robs it of its potency. Moreover, while “Radiant City” tries to figure out why so many of us instinctively loathe the suburbs, there’s no one speaking for the opposition, leaving “Radiant City” as little more than a monologue.

As one talking head observes, the critique of suburbia is well known to everyone, even those who choose to move there, and “Radiant City” can’t get below the surface. Watching people move into these sterile communities may be like watching lemmings race to their destruction, but surely something is driving them that goes a little deeper than the explanations offered by this film. And the solutions offered by the documentary are especially poor: one “expert” proposes putting apartments in abandoned shopping centers in order to reclaim retail space for residential living, taking it for granted that this would be a great thing. It’s humbling to realize that modern man can build a better cell phone or a smaller computer but we still can’t seem to figure out something as basic as how to build a working village.

Through June 10 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).