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Back in 1992, Ross Perot ran a surprisingly successful independent campaign for president on the issue of the national debt, which had ballooned under Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush. But even he’s fallen strangely silent now, when—after the brief financial rebound of the Clinton years, which actually brought surplus projections to the budget—the deficit has soared astronomically under Bush II and the danger to the nation’s future wellbeing has grown exponentially. And of course the current presidential candidates would prefer to talk about almost anything else. So “I.O.U.S.A.” arrives at a propitious moment.

The documentary comes from Patrick Creadon, whose last film, “Wordplay,” on the constructors and fillers of crossword puzzles, had its serious side in its sometimes sharp portraits of the contestants at a national tournament, but was essentially a lighthearted piece on a subject that’s hardly world-transforming. This one is on a topic crucial to the national interest (if you’ll pardon the pun).

But it’s also one that will hardly be as engaging to most viewers as brain-twisting word games (although that’s essentially what most politicians play when discussing the matter on the record). So Creadon jazzes up the presentation with as much visual pizzazz, and humor, as he can muster. He’s pretty successful, though the pie-graphs and cartoons are hardly state-of-the-art: as far as apocalyptic warnings are concerned, this one goes down fairly easily. More importantly, though, it’s a solid informational piece on a fiscal reality that can really be called a national emergency but has been swept under the carpet, one that offers a good deal of historical context that takes the story back to the earliest years of the Republic.

Much of the data is provided by the two “stars,” U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker, who’s taken on the role of alerting the congress and the public about the fiscal mess, and Robert Bixby, the director of the Concord Coalition, founded in the early nineties to talk up the subject. Together they travel the country on what thy call a Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, using free media to spread their message, and a good deal of the footage is devoted to their peregrinations and interviews with them.

But plenty of others make appearances—former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan, (the history and power of the Reserve are important elements of the story, and nicely treated), former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Paul O’Neill, Senators Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg, Congressman (and off-man-out Republican presidential candidate) Ron Paul, CBO head Alice Rivlin, investor extraordinaire Warren Buffett. There’s also plenty of newsreel footage, including shots of former presidents talking about the problem. And though the coverage is said to be non-partisan, of recent chief executives Clinton clearly comes off best, while well-deserved opprobrium is heaped upon the current administration. Given the data provided, Vice President Cheney’s reported remark to Secretary O’Neill that deficits don’t matter comes across as tantamount to official malfeasance.

This is hardly an overly slick production; technically it’s rudimentary, just as “Wordplay” was. But that hardly matters.

It’s probably too much to hope that “I.O.U.S.A.” will help promote a renewed national discussion of the deficit. American politics—and the realities of moviegoing—being what they are, I wouldn’t hold my breath. But the film would be a very useful tool for classroom presentations in economics and (if it’s taught anywhere today) civics.