'11th Hour': Inconvenient truths, plus Leo

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps.

To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn't sunk in.

That's one reason that "The 11th Hour," an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing.

The problem looks overwhelming, literally, as demonstrated by the images of overflowing landfills and sickeningly polluted bodies of water that flicker through the movie like damning evidence.

Structured in mainstream fiction-film fashion (in other words, like a term paper), it opens with an introduction that presents the case, builds momentum with an absorbing analytical middle section.

It wraps up with just enough optimism that I didn't want to run home and stick my head in an energy-efficient oven.

Written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and narrated on- and off-camera by Leonardo DiCaprio, who served as one of the producers, "The 11th Hour" attempts to stave off helplessness, and the nihilism that often follows it, mostly by appealing to our reason.

In one interview snippet after another, dozens of scientists, activists, gurus, policy types and even a magical-mushroom guy go through the arguments, present the data and criticize the anti-green faction, putting words to the images that are liberally interspersed between these talking heads like mortar.

Many of those same sober talking heads also argue with equal passion that we can save ourselves, along with the sky above us and the earth below. The capacity for human beings to fight gives hope where none might seem possible. *

Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Leila Conners Petersen, Chuck Castleberry and Brian Gerber, written and directed by Petersen and Nadia Conners, music by Jean-Pascal Beintus and Eric Avery, distributed by Warner Independent Pictures.