A photo from Generation Wealth (Lauren Greenfield/Amazon Studios)

Early on in the latest documentary by Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles), a child beauty pageant contestant engages in a shameless, “Show me the money”–type rant while decked out in a Las Vegas showgirl costume. A female business executive owns one of the world’s largest collections of modern art—and spends just as profusely to maintain her physical appearance. There’s also a disgraced ex-investment banker, who cackles aloud about all the houses and other creature comforts he once owned, paid for through ill-gotten gains.

A surreal, end-of-the-world quality pervades the opener, which is big on opulence but short on either modesty or shame. What does this behavior say about mankind as a whole, and America specifically? The theme of wealth and its effects on a society is traceable back to Greenfield’s earliest work, the 2008 documentary short “Kids + Money,” which chronicled the progeny of Los Angeles’s best and brightest. In Generation Wealth, we revisit a number of them years after their debuts, including one aspiring rap performer who dreamed about living a life of excess.

Greenfield, as it turns out, also grew up in that community, but even when discussing the contrast between their materialistic values and her family’s, she never strikes a superior tone. On the contrary, she spends the film trying to translate the phenomena she sees in as accessible terms as possible, and it leads to some heady talking points. For example, she ties the appeal of bling to the lack of social mobility in America today. In effect, if there’s no way people will build statues to you, you build them yourself.

In many respects, the film serves as a continuation of the director’s oeuvre, which has centered on such themes as the worship of pop culture, the allure of instant celebrity, and the commodification of the human body, especially women’s. She touches on them all this time around, considering each as a symptom of the larger disease of American overindulgence. That is, when it comes to sex, money, and power, Greenfield argues the American way means never having enough. In cutting back and forth among her wide cross section of subjects, she reveals the hangover that inevitably results from a life spent in such pursuits.

There isn’t a single protagonist who Greenfield doesn’t attempt to humanize by circling back to them repeatedly, catching some of them as they change their minds about what’s most important to them, while others remain maddeningly the same. She has a particular empathy toward women. From a young age, the film points out, girls are taught that their bodies have value. However, for some it only runs skin-deep. The more notable of Greenfield’s female profiles includes Kacey Jordan, the porn star who achieved infamy as actor Charlie Sheen’s lover—and then made career and life decisions that put her health at risk in order to say in the limelight.

On a visual level, Generation Wealth feels like Greenfield’s most accomplished film yet. For the interviews, she frequently frames her subjects in their respective homes, which practically become secondary characters thanks to her eye for background details. There are also sequences in which Greenfield combines archived photographs with audio footage that had been taken concurrently, which brings those moments to life in a way that feels immediate.

But the biggest shift is that after telling her earlier films in vérité style, Greenfield is a very active participant here, daring to examine her own addiction to her career. Over the course of her photography career, and then her filmmaking, she continuously pursued the rush of getting articles and books published and getting films made. Yet it came at a price, as we can see from home videos of her children, who, as they grow up before our eyes, become increasingly frustrated by her absences.

Yet the film ultimately finds hope in, of all places, family and its capacity to rescue us from ourselves. Despite its focus on materialism, Generation Wealth ends up as a tribute to loved ones, who bring richness to life that money cannot.