Perhaps it was filmmaker Darryl Roberts’s intention, when he set out to make a documentary criticizing this country’s obsession with physical perfection, to end up with a shoddy little message vehicle that appears to have been shot on a camcorder. In one sense, “America the Beautiful,” which opens Friday at Cinema Village, features an artful fusion of form and content. In another sense, it could use — forgive the expression — an extreme makeover.

Mr. Roberts comes across as a very sympathetic fellow, and he has chosen an interesting subject and the right time to explore it. Thanks in part to makeover reality shows, the popularity of cosmetic surgery in America is at an all-time high. And the film (albeit rather haphazardly) throws some alarming statistics up on screen: Americans make up 5% of the world’s population, yet are exposed to 40% of its advertising; 46% of girls between the ages 9 and 11, surely influenced by fashion magazines, are “sometimes or often” on a diet.

From this provocative fodder, though, the film makes few new or compelling points. Take the video that fast-forwards through the creation of a billboard for a well-known Dove campaign that supposedly features “real” women. The point of the clip, which first surfaced on YouTube almost two years ago, is that even non-professional models get hair and makeup, and that billboard images are significantly retouched.

You don’t say.

Throughout his film, Mr. Roberts poses as a gentle naïf making his way through America’s bewildering physical image complex. (He even asks one young man, “What’s a six-pack?”) But the shtick gets old, especially when it leads him to waste time on foregone conclusions. After the founders of a members-only Web site for so-called beautiful people offer the lame argument that their online club is also about inner beauty, Mr. Roberts joins up. He’s a perfectly friendly man. He’s also bald, middle-aged, and being somewhat generous when he describes his body type as “athletic.” If you think he’s got a chance of making a “friend” on this moronic site, you should probably go back to your yurt.

Later, Mr. Roberts brings an armful of beauty products to a lab, where they are found to contain harmful chemicals. Well, no one really said they didn’t. The more important question is why makeup ingredients that have been linked to cancer are banned in Europe — home to plenty of powerhouse beauty companies — but are still legal here. But the film drops in a newspaper clipping and a sound-bite about a California court case and moves on.

Mr. Roberts’s idea of muckraking is to make a quick stop at every disparate corner of the topic and interview the most loathsome person he can find (sometimes with the boom mike or the cameraman’s thumb in the frame). Making appearances are a callous Us Weekly reporter, a fraudulent plastic surgeon, and a racist anthropologist whom Mr. Roberts later discovers to be bipolar. There are also some random celebrities caught at red-carpet events with nothing to say. And at which dirtbag convention did Mr. Roberts discover the guy who can’t wait for cloning to “eliminate all the nasty chicks?”

It’s a shame there are so many voices — including Mr. Roberts’s sleepy narration — drowning out Gerren Taylor. A fashion model who made headlines when she walked New York runways at the astounding age of 12, then found herself being told by casting directors (one of whose names is misspelled) she was too fat, Ms. Taylor’s fascinating story has everything Mr. Roberts needs: an impressionable youth, an irresponsible parent, a flustered educator, and the Janus-faced fashion world. At one point, she tosses aside a push-up bra she once begged her mother to let her wear. “Now that I don’t go to public school anymore — I just homeschool — I don’t even need this bra,” she muses, a little sadly. “I guess peer pressure did have a lot to do with that bra.”

Unfortunately, the epilogue whisks Ms. Taylor back into the film’s facile, hopscotching, cliché-ridden narrative: “She joined a spiritual center and regained her self-esteem.”