James D. Scurlock, who gave unexpected zest to the unhappy story of Enron a couple of years back (in “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”), turns his attention to a nation awash in credit-card and mortgage debt in this documentary, with decent if unspectacular results.

The strength of “Maxed Out” is that it displays the dark underbelly of the lending industry, presenting case studies about ordinary folk robbed of their homes by unscrupulous institutions and college students literally driven to suicide by policies that lure them to overspend on credit and become virtual slaves to interest payments. The dirty little secret is that banks and corporate lenders target those least likely to be able to pay even minimum monthly amounts because those are the very souls they can keep in their thrall forever by ratcheting up interest rates to astronomical levels.

Scurlock has put the picture together intelligently, using interviews with mothers who have lost their children, homeowners put into hock by false promises, and a variety of other debtors, but also including sessions with small-timers in the debt-collecting business, snippets from Congressional committee testimony and explanatory segments by knowledgeable observers, including reporters and university economics professors as well as radio talk-show host Dave Ramsey, who offers sound economic advice based on his own experiences while commiserating with callers in financial straits.

There’s little doubt that “Maxed Out” succeeds in illustrating how deep and pervasive the credit problem is in today’s America, and the way in which the industry takes advantage of the most vulnerable members of society. But it’s equally true that the film doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know. It’s a solid, informative piece, but not a revelatory one.

And if you should go see it, it’s probably a good idea to pay at the boxoffice with cash rather than via a credit card.