Review: I.O.U.S.A

As if a national debt nearing $10 trillion was not too much to conceive, imagine finding a way to communicate that sum and its consequences in a documentary. For his second feature, Chicago native Patrick Creadon (“Wordplay”) takes up that daunting challenge. And falters, if not fails. His history of the country’s debt proves the most accessible and successful segment. The debt was zero in 1835. War, in the timeline Creadon charts, inflicts fiscal trauma that merits a political analysis, besides an economic one. “There does not exist an engine so corruptive of the government and so demoralizing of the nation as public debt,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Nathaniel Macon in 1821. “It will bring on us more ruin at home than all our enemies abroad.” Creadon picks two town criers on a “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour” who are trying to inform and alarm the public. David M. Walker was Comptroller General of the United States and headed the Government Accountability Office from 1998 to 2008. He’s joined by Bob Bixby, executive director of the Coalition (“a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to eliminating federal budget deficits”). A key resource is the 2005 book “Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis” by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin. But “I.O.U.S.A.” may get more traction with the free one-page book “Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford,” as seen on “Saturday Night Live.” Sampling that satiric infomercial from December 2007 is far more effective than interviewing random under-informed Americans, as Jay Leno likes to do. With Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Paul O’Neill and Warren Buffett. 90m. (Bill Stamets)