From opportunistic PR to blind good or bad luck and most steps in between, certain figures’ most public, sometimes posthumous, often profitable creations turn out to be themselves. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer. Kahlo, Picasso and Dalí. Warhol, Vadim and Polanski. Monroe, Gibson, now Cruise. In this line, Michael Moore is the object of the current flood of social, political and artistic responses, and it was only a matter of time before an enterprising someone else did an MM film in which the controversial ubiquitous director is for once not the center of attention but merely the irritating grain in the oyster. Thus, director/co-producer Steven Greenstreet’s This Divided State.

Concretely, the title noun refers to seventy-five-percent Mormon Utah but has implications for the post-9/11, Patriot Act country as a whole. A Thomas-Paine gadfly for the choir, cynical money-maker to others, unwelcome “evil” to more than a few in this film, Moore does not appear in the flesh until near the end, where his delivery two weeks before the Bush-Kerry vote is anticlimactic, a seemingly extempore rah-rah that is wrong on its only two points: a new national president and harmony among courageous student government leaders.

Himself a Mormon with a two-year foreign ministry under his belt, twenty-five-year-old Greenstreet dropped out of Brigham Young University to devote his time to putting together this documentary about 17,000-enrollment Utah Valley State College in Orem, the “Family City USA” of 90,000 a skip up Interstate 15 from Provo.

Working initially ad hoc and with a partly amateur student crew, the director stepped into “complete and utter chaos.” Agreeing to the high end of the Fahrenheit 9/11 director’s thirty-five-to-forty-thousand-dollar engagement fee, the UVSC student council had invited him to speak on campus, with costs to be paid from student coffers and ticket sales. Along with support, council president Jim Bassi and vice president Joe Vogel, longtime friends, also became the targets of verbal, legal, and a couple threatened physical, attacks from some students and city residents. Under self-appointed spokespersons in both camps, the traditionally ultra-conservative, Republican, God’s Country-Zion state disintegrated into a “Moore War” battlefield.

Amidst McCarthy-era vituperation and Book of Mormon scripture-quoting, the issue became, not the immediate speaker, but a Berkley-esque First-Amendment-slash-academic freedom vs. community values, and of “whom,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote regarding Virginia, “will you make your inquisitors?” Such “rich and compelling subject matter” at first presented the downside of where to begin, how to organize in spontaneity as things happen. As shifting sands hardened, the film was able to concentrate primarily on the activities of student, faculty and community leaders who emerged, sometimes amusing or eccentric but mostly articulate -- including Moore lookalike Ken Brown and even a Michael Sean Moore.

Beyond controversy over the original speaker’s fee were the windfalls of wealthy resident and anti- activist Kay Anderson’s public panel flaunting, or bribe, of a $25,000 Alpine Credit Union cheque to withdraw the invitation, and the travel-expense-only $58,000 (private jet and crew) balancing appearance on campus of right-wing FOX News showman Sean Hannity.

Students who speak a single time are generally identified by first name only, but others become more central players -- Brown, a Bush man but free-speech advocate; and conservative senior Shawn Vreeland, circulating a petition on his own -- and, while humorous professor Alex Cordero insists it’s all about asking questions and not money, other fashionable favorites’ $100,000-plus speaking fees are noted.

In November the Utah youth vote turnout was no better than four years previously, as expected the White House incumbent received the red state’s five electoral votes, and donations to the College dropped by $200,000. But this sobering documentary is not about the money, either. Even less about Michael Moore. It is about whether education is “hired” or not, about tolerance, consensus and minority opinion, the Constitution. It is about how divided we have become as a people, in defiance of Franklin’s “all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

(Released by Minority Films LLC; not rated by MPAA.)