Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) plays a scientist and businessman at ADM, a nebulous agro-something company that, from the looks of it, specializes in starch and competes heavily with the Japanese. He decides to blow the whistle on a price fixing scheme that may or may not be real. What’s surprising about the crime is how commonplace it is. FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) remarks that Whitacre taught the FBI how five white guys talking wasn’t just a meeting, it was a crime scene. But the sense of crime is lost as price fixing just looks like pricing. Whether the scheme exists or is even a scheme at all is hard to tell.

Also difficult to figure is why Whitacre does anything he does. I suspect that telling the truth isn’t high on his list. Even Shepard—Whitacre’s handler—can’t comprehend why he’d rat out the company at which he was a steadily rising star. The answer, I suppose, is a demented quest for glory, and a deluded sense of self-sacrifice.

As any Soderbergh film, The Informant! handles its apolitical surface deftly, then uses narrative and emotion to frame the story as pure Robin Hoodism. The case Whitacre built was a cornerstone of mid-90s antitrust legislation, though you wouldn’t know it from the film. Damon sets the bar high for aching stupidity—it’s sad to watch him fumbling through the life of a super secret agent he imagines, to watch the minutiae of megalomania play out over desperate phone calls and dinners. By the end of the film, as Whitacre’s toupee slides off of his head and it’s revealed that he’s been stealing millions from ADM, my empathy-level was so high I would have signed his pardon myself.

More than emotional blackmail, Whitacre’s stupidity also manages to embody the stupidity of the biopic genre itself. As Erin Brockovitch showed, Soderbergh has mastered the genre once; and with Che, he took it beyond its potential. Now he seems more interested in exposing the inanity of the biopic, in which a character’s every banal thought can be presented as a flower of insight, every experience as a cornerstone of the individual’s narrative. In The Informant!, Soderbergh is out to dismantle these assumptions with a dark humor reminiscent of Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud. Both films give the audience what they want—but also make sure they suffer a little bit in the process.