Film

Roger & Me

Name: Roger & Me
Genre: Documentary, History, Comedy
Released: 1989
Cast: Michael Moore, Rhonda Britton, Fred Ross, Roger B. Smith, Bob Eubanks

Roger & Me is the blueprint for a whole genre of documentary that didn't exist before it - part exposé, part stand-up act, all fury. Michael Moore chases GM's CEO through boardrooms and country clubs while Flint, Michigan quietly falls apart behind him. It's funny in a way that never lets you forget the grief underneath. Essential for anyone curious where the 'gotcha' documentary began, before it became a genre unto itself.

TMDb rating

7.1

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Bowling for Columbine2002

Moore refines everything Roger & Me started - bigger canvas, sharper editing, same weapon-grade sarcasm, this time aimed at gun culture instead of General Motors. It's the spiritual sequel.

But His style is divisive; if the finger-pointing narration grated here, it only gets louder and more confident there.

American Factory2019

A Chinese company reopens the same kind of Rust Belt plant Moore watched die, and the culture clash that follows is patient, observational, and far less interested in villains than Moore ever was.

But No jokes, no narrator winking at you - it trusts silence and long scenes, which some viewers find slow going.

Harlan County U.S.A.1976

The granddaddy of American labor documentaries - filmmakers embedded with striking Kentucky coal miners for over a year, getting shot at for their trouble. Raw, unglamorous, completely without irony.

But It's grainy 70s vérité with none of Moore's showmanship; if you need a guide holding your hand, this won't provide one.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Plow That Broke the Plains1936

Same structural move as Roger & Me - a place undone by economics beyond its control, captured on film as it happens - but fifty years earlier and without a shred of irony or a director on camera.

Made for the U.S. government during the Dust Bowl, this is the ancestor Moore never mentions - a short, lyrical documentary about land and livelihood destroyed by forces the people living there never chose.

But It's scored like a tone poem, paced like an old newsreel, and entirely earnest - if you came for jokes, there are none.

Super Size Me2004

Morgan Spurlock borrows Moore's playbook - filmmaker as guinea pig, corporation as target, stunt as structure - and applies it to McDonald's with the same gonzo, first-person energy.

But The thirty-days-of-McDonald's premise has aged into a bit of a gimmick, and some of its science has been challenged since.

The Corporation2003

A more academic, talking-heads dissection of what corporations actually are and what they owe to the people they employ - a good chaser if Roger & Me left you angry and wanting theory.

But Nearly three hours long and genuinely dense; it's a lecture where Moore's film is a bit.

Fahrenheit 9/112004

Moore at the height of his cultural power, turning the same ambush-and-montage technique on the Bush administration and the Iraq War. Whatever you think of the politics, the craft is unmistakable.

But It's louder, angrier, and far more explicitly partisan than Roger & Me ever was - a different temperature entirely.

Detropia2012no page yet

A quieter, more elegiac look at what Flint's fate eventually became for Detroit itself - opera singers and autoworkers sharing a dying city, shot with real visual beauty.

But It has no Moore-style protagonist or throughline to follow; it drifts, which some will find hypnotic and others frustrating.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room2005

Swaps factory floors for boardrooms, but it's the same fundamental story - executives making decisions that devastate ordinary employees while insisting everything's fine. Genuinely gripping as a thriller.

But It's talking heads and financial detail rather than Moore's on-the-street chaos; different pleasures, less mischief.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room poster

Blackfish2013

Proof the documentary-as-accusation model Moore popularized could be turned on any institution - here it's SeaWorld, and the film's anger is just as personal and just as effective.

But It's a straightforward, no-jokes indictment; nothing of Moore's absurdist comic timing survives the transplant.

Gung Ho1986no page yet

The same fear - one factory deciding whether a whole town lives or dies - reimagined as mainstream entertainment instead of muckraking, made in the exact Reagan-era moment Roger & Me was filming.

A broad studio comedy from the same decade, about a Japanese auto company taking over a failing American plant town - Flint's exact anxiety turned into a Michael Keaton vehicle full of culture-clash gags.

But It's dated, occasionally cringeworthy in its stereotypes, and resolves its real economic dread with a tidy, feel-good ending Moore would never allow.

Salt of the Earth1954

Both films are about corporate power crushing a working community, but one hides its makers and centers the workers with total solemnity, while the other puts the filmmaker himself front and center as clown and conscience at once.

A blacklisted crew, banned from Hollywood, made this fictionalized account of a real New Mexico mine strike - dignified, angry, and startlingly serious where Moore is deliberately, gleefully not.

But It's slow, openly didactic, and stripped of any showman's charisma - there's no Moore-figure to root for or against, just the workers themselves.