(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's a Sunday evening in downtown Manhattan, where an upscale crowd of 200 moviegoers is receiving some vital "truths" about American enterprise--tales of unbridled greed and worker oppression. As the credits roll and the lights come up, the stoop-shouldered, shaggy-haired, overweight director, writer, and star--who is "protecting the earth from the scum of corporate America," according to his movie poster--slinks onto the stage. The audience cheers. From the back of the room comes the first question: "Michael, who are you gonna target next?"

"FORTUNE magazine," comes Michael Moore's reply.

It's a throwaway line, but I'm the only one who gets it. I've been making a nuisance of myself--following Moore around, posing obnoxious questions, loitering in the lobby of his apartment building, and interviewing people who don't like him. It's not a particularly nice way to do journalism, but it's one Moore himself elevated to an art form in his 1989 film Roger & Me, in which the self-styled "shlub from Flint" (Michigan) took on General Motors. The movie chronicled Moore's two-year pursuit of then-CEO Roger Smith as he tried (in vain) to get Smith on camera to justify GM's layoffs in the town. It was a self-aggrandizing, truth-twisting piece of work--but it was also fresh, funny, scathing, and occasionally brilliant. Roger & Me turned the shlub into a Rush Limbaugh for the left. It also made him rich.

Moore's new movie, The Big One--a "run-and-gun, subversive, on-the-road thing" released by Miramax in April--is intended, he says, as "an antidote to the mantra in the media: The economy is great! The economy is great!" Filmed in the course of a 47-city promotional tour for Moore's 1996 book, Downsize This! Random Threats From an Unarmed American, the docudrama strikes a kind of Mike-Wallace-in-work-boots pose, its thesis being that no matter where you travel in this great land, unseen but unspeakable acts of corporate aggression are being perpetrated on the American worker. His goal: to track the capitalist dog to its lair. Using a cell phone and a laptop plugged into their rental van's cigarette lighter, Moore and his gang of four surf the internet to locate offenders in the city du jour. Then, between book signings, they storm the barricades at places like Procter & Gamble and Pillsbury, and pester the gatekeepers to take them to their leader. That Moore fails to get to any CEOs except Phil Knight at Nike doesn't matter. In fact, that's his point: The fat cats' rapacity outstrips any sense of accountability to their workers or to society.

"I'm thinking about Mother Teresa going to speak to the poor," says Moore, 44, as I sit upwind from a Chinese takeout feast he's inhaling at Miramax's Manhattan offices. "Me talking to FORTUNE is kind of the opposite of that."

I ask why The Big One casts America as the Land of Layoffs at a time when unemployment is at a 24-year low. He responds that "the people I talk to are saying, 'Where's my invitation to the party?' " When I ask him the purpose of a corporation, he mimics the CEO credo: "First and foremost, the fiduciary responsibility is to shareholders. Ha! Ha! Ha! I've read the U.S. Constitution, and the word 'shareholder' doesn't appear once." The line comes straight out of the movie.

Michael "aims to tell the truth with a twist," says his wife (and producer of The Big One), Kathleen Glynn. And twist he does. In the new movie, Moore storms commando-style into the Milwaukee headquarters of Johnson Controls, an auto parts manufacturer. There he presents his "Downsizer of the Year" award to some terrified flacks. Granted, Johnson Controls had just announced a plant closing, but the company is hardly a downsizer. In fact, it has increased its U.S. work force 24% in the past five years. "I didn't even know what Johnson Controls was before we got to Milwaukee," admits Moore, when I add this information to his feedbag.

The son of a GM spark-plug assembler and a secretary, Moore has, by his reckoning, given away some $520,000 to various causes since he made Roger & Me. ("I'm a working-class guy," he protests.) But the whole Moore phenomenon would be easier to swallow if his only weaknesses were a taste for first-class travel and a 2,200-square-foot, $1.3 million apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Chris Kelly, head writer on the TV show Politically Incorrect, says working with Moore on his on-again, off-again series TV Nation was "traumatic." He adds, "The aggression you see onscreen is not fake. The attack on Phil Knight that's so funny in the movie isn't so funny when he does the same thing at work." A few years ago, six staffers on TV Nation complained to the Writers Guild that they weren't receiving proper pay and credit. While Moore says it was a contractual issue, they clearly think otherwise. (The Big One crew insists he's a good guy--but a relentless perfectionist.)

As films go, The Big One is a triumph of unwitting symbolism: Even as the subversive, capitalist-bashing shlub is being flown first-class around the U.S. by one of the world's largest publishing conglomerates--hyping a capitalist-bashing book spun off from the capitalist-bashing movie that made him millions--he is making still another capitalist-bashing film, this one to be released by an "independent studio" that is in fact owned by those unionists over at Disney.

It's Tuesday night, The Big One's premiere, and 150 friends, fans, and fellow filmmakers are partying at the Screening Room, a trendy theater/restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Blue-jeaned and baseball-capped, Moore is in full schmooze with his new friend Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, actor Billy Baldwin, veteran Hollywood producer David Brown, and cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Suddenly I find myself being introduced to a wary-eyed woman. "I'm a capitalist," whispers Joanne Legomsky, a former equities analyst. "I'm a little embarrassed, but I think it's unethical for companies not to work for shareholders."

Don't tell me, ma'am--tell it to the large one over there working his next deal.

--Patricia Sellers