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There’s a moment in director Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary Alt-Right: Age of Rage where Lough includes the speech that Donald Trump delivered after the 2017 Charlottesville demonstrations led to the murder of Heather Heyer as she was run down in the streets by a white-supremacist demonstrator. This was the “good and bad people on both sides” speech that managed to stand out among Trump’s most risible speeches. The failure to differentiate between white supremacist, racist, anti-semitic, neo-Nazi protesters and the “anti-fa” who stood in resistance to them crystalized the kind of false equivalencies that the Trump right have used to avoid taking a stand against the white supremacists that make up a lot of their base.

That Lough includes Trump’s both-sides speech is a bit more curious when you look at Alt-Right: Age of Rage as a whole, a movie that, in many ways, sets up the Alt-Right (white nationalist) movement side-by-side with the anti-fa movement and cuts between both like this is a mere point-counterpoint debate. While the tone of the film often makes it clear that Lough lends more credence to Daryle Lamont Jenkins and his anti-fa demonstrators, it’s hard to set aside the feeling that you’re also being pitched to by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke, and Jared Taylor, and you’re being pitched on their terms.

Again, this does not seem like what the filmmakers intended here at all. The intent seems to be to present the lay of the land in America circa Trump’s first term. The white supremacist movement has been inarguably emboldened by the Trump election — we know that because Duke and Spencer and Proud Boys founder Gavin MacInnes all say so — to the point where they’re something we have to deal with. The Klan and neo-Nazis have always been sad and sometimes scary miniscule minority, but as factors like Trump and the internet have brought the old-school white supremacists into contact with MAGA-hat activists, Men’s Rights supporters, Gamer-Gate trolls, and other such malcontents, all of whom seem to have settled on black and brown people, women, and liberals as the enemy, their numbers have swelled and they’ve gotten more organized. Lough’s film tracks that development to a point, though he also takes time to do things like let Richard Spencer lay out plans for the Ethno-state and let Jared Taylor talk about differences in IQ levels among the races.

On the other side of the aisle sits Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who has offered himself up as one of the faces of the anti-fa movement (many choose not to reveal their identities for fear of retribution). Jenkins gets time to lay out his case, too, and we see footage of him showing up at many white-nationalist events, exposing those in attendance for who they are. Jenkins’s ethos includes exposing these racists and leaving the door open to violent action in self-defense. Here again, on the subject of violence and whether it’s necessary or counter-productive, Lough makes sure to include views from all quadrants: Spencer is a white supremacist who advocates violence, while Jared Taylor speaks in no uncertain terms of his opposition to violent acts; on the other side, as well, some advocate active, physical resistance while others say it’s a losing tactic. You get the feeling that by the end of the movie, you’ll be asked to take a personality quiz and end up with a Meyers-Briggs-style score that will place you somewhere on the racist/anti-fa, violent/non-violent spectrum.

Age of Rage finds its sharpest focus in its second half, as it revisits the Charlottesville protests with bracing, if familiar, detail. Here, Lough’s parallel structure appears to pay off in both sides colliding in the streets. But I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Charlottesville episode of Vice News Tonight that covered the same Charlottesville story with more immediacy, was more closely embedded with people on both sides, but which managed to be so aggressively unvarnished that you never felt like you were being pitched to by the white supremacists.

Ultimately, Alt-Right: Age of Rage is eye-opening if you’re looking for a delineation of the white supremacists-vs-antifa talking points without all the noise of Twitter fights interrupting. But if, ultimately, a calm, seemingly reasonable debate is what the white nationalists want — a calm, orderly debate where the map of the United States is divided neatly into entho-states — then it becomes harder to see who benefits. With the Alt-Right, it seems quite wrong to dress them up in a suit and give them a comfortable chair from which to preach.

Stream Alt-Right: Age of Rage on Twitter