In their documentary short “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert captured the failure and closing of a Dayton, Ohio General Motors plant that closed in 2008.

Some ten thousand longtime GM employees lost their jobs and a big chunk of their future when the plant closed at the beginning of the Great Recession. That’s how Reichert and Bognar begin their new film, as well — the aftermath and aftershocks of that closure.

Jill confesses she “struggled to get back to the middle class,” living in her sister’s basement. Others speak of months and years of job hunting, skilled factory workers in a part of the world where such skills are unneeded in an American workforce whose needs and requirements are changing.

But “American Factory” (now on Netflix) is about a glimmer of hope, the Chinese firm that figures an empty factory, a desperate workforce and a whole lot of state incentive money adds up to a profitable investment in Dayton. We see Fuyao Automotive Glass move in, with hopeful workers listening to a pitch at a job fair, the plant’s opening and the pitfalls and the trials and tribulations that follow.

There’s a hint of the culture clash comedy “Gung Ho” to this, with hundreds of Chinese employees and supervisors brought in to help start the place up, and a couple of thousand new American jobs for workers willing to retrain in a different corner of the auto industry, learn a few words in Chinese, each side trying to “read” and get along with the other.

See the Americans embrace the “culture” of the company, with some visiting the corporate HQ back in China, learning to sing (or at least listening to) the “transparent” company anthem, absorbing the many slogans the Communist/Capitalists serve up to the workforce. One even weeps at the globalism “We are One” message of a parade of singers, dancers and sketch-performers at a big company banquet.

And we also see Americans bridling at the various safety and health shortcuts their new bosses want to impose, the “Be alert, be earnest, be lively” and “Accept Good Glass, Create Good Glass, Transfer Good Glass” indoctrination emblazoned on every wall. The two thousand are so jobs pay less than half what GM did.

And the boss? He’s more out of “The Simpsons” than “Gung Ho.” Smiling Chairman Cho Tak Wong declares, “If a union comes in, I’m shutting down.”

“American Factory” follows this culture clash through the first five years of Fuyao Glass America’s existence. And although we’re not told the incentive money put in by government, and the time parameters of it, these years are fraught enough that we fret for the long-term prospects of this enterprise through what might be, as the presidential candidate Andrew Yang has been warning, the last generation of a manufacturing labor force that is being automated into oblivion.

The candor here can be amusing — the burly Americans criticized for their “fat fingers” by the lean, younger Chinese (behind their backs), an American inviting Chinese colleagues over for Thanksgiving on his farm — turkey, ham and a little shooting time on the DIY firing range he’s set up behind the house.

The movie’s more unsettling side is the ugly stereotyping the Chinese, young and old, carry around about Americans, who are “lazy” and “love to be flattered to death…Donkeys like being touched in the direction their hair grows” one higher-up counsels.

Xenophobia is a two-way street, with red-blooded Buckeyes bridling at video screens filled with Chinese child singers warbling songs of efficiency, profitability and peace.

There are Chinese staff meetings, and American staff meetings. In the Chinese ones, ethnic identity and cohesion is stressed among the expats, who will “always be Chinese,” even though they’re living and working in the flatlands of Ohio.

Sure, speech is free here, and virtually every American worker lives in better conditions than the lower-level managers imported to “supervise” do. But the Chinese cannot fathom why they can’t impose “efficiencies” that endanger employees (“OSHA?”), why they can’t dump toxic byproducts down the drain (“EPA?”) and why the Americans won’t work 12 hours a day, with just two days off a month.

“American Factory,” made under the aegis of Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, is no celebration of the politics of “bringing back jobs and saving a community.” It’s about a fight to unionize, a struggle for common ground and a totalitarian management/ownership style that’s not the least bit alien to American workers these days, unfortunately.

Speaking of “aliens,” there’s a hint of science fiction in the eager way certain higher-paid American management types buy in to the ethos of their new masters. When Senator Sherrod Brown mentions unions in his speech at the grand opening, one grousing minion  jokes “I’m gonna have to kill me a senator.”

It’s hard to see this and not think of “1984,” of a workforce of “proles” powerless to resist the depressed wages and thankless work offered by People’s Republicans, who have a lot in common with America’s robber barons, and with those who enslave in the bastardized interpretation of Marx or Lenin.

“American Factory” is too dispassionate to be a rallying cry, too sobering to be a “wake-up call,” but still a terrific fly-on-the-wall look at the struggles of America’s working class.

And it’s a reminder that politicians might want to be wary of Chinese bearing gifts — if you provide plenty of incentives for them to do it.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity

Credits: Directed by Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50