Former Internet whiz kid and green activist Chris Paine’s first feature documentary is about exactly what the title says. Who Killed the Electric Car? emerges as a no-frills consideration of said subject. One might point to the tyro’s lack of experience and objectivity as the reason for the study’s defects on-screen, but the root goes deeper and is symptomatic of what ails the majority of currently popular non-fiction output. Like Huey Long “convinced by the logic of my own argument,” this documentary, like its genre on the whole, degenerates into monologue and ends up as a visual editorial. Burdened with printed information, easy graphics and referral to sympathetic Websites, this one, too, is no more than a shrill argument that not so cleverly gives unequal time to the opposition only to make it look silly.

I am anti-automobile, live in New York not least because one can get around by foot or subway, and have agitated for banning private automobiles on this island. But personal leanings should not blind a viewer to the unsubtle one-sidedness of this non-cinematographic presentation: people do not respond well to unadulterated harangue but, on the contrary, need to be given a feeling that arguments (which do not equal a film) on both sides allow for informed decision-making.

No one will come out as being anti-environment, but even that is weakened in Who Killed the Electric Car? by self-righteous narration and diluted beyond caring in a kitchen-sink hodgepodge of business greed, political pork barreling, commercial advertisements, commissions, public utilities and public apathy, consumer selfishness, auto museums and graveyards (including a mock funeral), police barricades, inventors, activists, owners and renters, and a benumbing parade of talking faces with bad lower teeth and foreheads cropped off, featuring politicians and Ph.D.s, journalist Paul Roberts, Ralph Nader, an ill-advised bearded Mel Gibson, irrelevant Phyllis Diller beside a prominent Bob Hope portrait, wisecracking Tom Hanks on Letterman, Governor Schwarzenegger, and (among a dozen or so gushing electric car drivers) Baywatch’s Alexandra Paul.

Back in the higgledy-piggledy of America’s laissez-faire, 220 volts was mostly muscled aside by Edison’s less efficient 110. Just so, the monotone of Martin Sheen tells us, the overhead-line trolley and grandma’s electric car -- a couple frames of each to show the nostalgic, the curious, the too young -- fell to Detroit’s less efficient fossil-fuel infernal internal combustion road hog. Legislators tripped over one another asphalting the country, and urban areas breathed in their own excremental exhaust. Until, in the face of spiking juvenile respiratory illnesses, one state was moved to act.

After the car funeral and overheads of smoggy cities as exposition, the film zeroes in on CARB, the California Air Resources Board, which in 1990 demanded that two percent of licensed vehicles be emission free (ZEV) within eight years, building to five times that within another half-decade. In 1996-97, troubled giant General Motors inaugurated its electric vehicle the Impact, renamed EV1 -- there never was a 2 -- and set up an attractive group of young unmarried Sales Specialists.

Despite aesthetic, environmental and low-maintenance appeals, the EV1 was not promoted, nor were its operators allowed to be other than leaseholders at five hundred dollars per month. Amidst the scattershot of facts and “honest truth” testimonials that follow, some vague timeline emerges. Others enter the field -- Honda, Ford (Th!nk EV), Toyota (whose RAV4 was, at $42,00, the only purchasable EV) -- but without appreciable commitment or desire to convince the consumer.

Expiring leases cannot be renewed, and the handful of sorrowful convinced drivers band together to protest and publicize the conspiracy-theory skullduggery fate of their brief chariots. Sued and otherwise pressured, CARB pulls the teeth from emissions requirements, as automakers cite low public response and, instead, push confusingly detailed research into hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell technology. Its 1987 solar-generated Sunraycer a long-dead curiosity, GM indicates the future in purchasing rights to the Hummer name.

Here and there bold-letter titles have indicated the usual SUSPECTS in the “killing,” and, too breezily, in the end most everyone (the public not excepted) is deemed GUILTY as charged.

Maintaining a surprising whimsical humor, Who Killed the Electric Car? is still too moralistic and lecture-hallish for its own purposes. Spread so thin, dragging in so much and so many, it does not enlighten and comes nowhere near entertaining an audience -- two basics for successful filmmaking. 

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated "PG" for mild language.)