There’s cold comfort for American and international audiences taking in “Prime Minister,” a new documentary about New Zealand’s first female prime minister, the woman who led the country through a horrific mass shooting hate crime, a volcanic erruption, COVID and the blowback lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates generated.

Oh. Gullible, belligerently violent morons aren’t solely an America/British et al phenomenon.

The Kiwi country that greeted Jacinda Ardern‘s rise to power with sexist skepticism and found itself impressed with her leadership qualities and her humanity, celebrated the world over for her compassion, forward thinking and problem solving decisiveness — Nobody handled COVID better. Nobody. — found itself roiled by violent, misinformed, media-dominating protests by a noisy minority that couldn’t even spell her bloody name right. Or, as I realized researching this review, her partner and later husband’s (Clarke Gayford) name.

The Sundance award winning “Prime Minister” is an intimate portrait, an oral history of Ardern’s unexpected elevation to leadership of the Labour Party at age 37, her realization that she was pregnant while finishing up Labour’s winning campaign in 2017, having a baby in office and everything she had to contend with on the job — often bringing baby Neve into cabinet meetings and even the U.N. General Assembly.

And the film is a reflection back on her work, the challenges she faced and how she handled crisis after crisis with compassion, intelligence — getting the best scientific advice available and taking it — and decisiveness.

New Zealand’s worst-ever mass shooting, a hate crime against Muslims committed by an Australian radicalized by Trump-worshipping American online hate sites and Rupert Murdoch’s global right wing smear-o-sphere was met with efforts to comfort the Muslim community in New Zealand, a call for unity, and a sweeping ban on assault weapons and military firearms in civilian hands.

The country went along with her “kindness” ethos. The right wing punditocracy and conspiracy buffs freaked completely out.

Ardern remembers that shooting and “the longest week of my life” as she sits down for short interviews for an as-it-happens oral history project the she agreed to participate in. Her partner, Gayford, was a popular New Zealand TV presenter (“Fish of the Day“), something not mentioned here. He videoed her, questioned her and captured footage of their home life with a new baby and outside crises competing for attention.

“Crises make governments and they break governments,” she opines.

“Be really nice to see you sometime,” baby-daddy and caregiver Gayford cracks from behind the camera.

We see Ardern begin her term with a shaky coalition including an anti-immigrant fringe party, and see her decisions and determination to be open, to “tell people what you know, even when it’s not” pleasant or what they want to hear style win her a sweeping new mandate.

There’s her landmark appearance at the UN with her baby, a day when a sea of world leaders openly laughed at Donald Trump’s bragging lies about “accomplishments. And then there was her ever-so-diplomatic handling of talk show host Stephen Colbert’s questions about that expression of international mockery for the blustery Trump.

Ardern’s open progressivism and “internationalism,” eschewing “isolationism, protectionism and racism” was and is defiantly out of step with much of the electorate in the world’s democracies. That explains why she’s not in power now (We see her lecturing at Harvard.), and that the old adage she repeats about “crises make governments” doesn’t work in a media landscape dominated by lies and bad actors — Russians and Rupert — spreading them.

“Prime Minister” is thus an against the grain movie of its moment, out of step politically, and an intimate to the point of myopic doc that zeroes in on the personality it is profiling. But it’s still refreshing to see that violent, foul-mouthed right wing cranks are not simply a Northern Hemisphere problem, and to be reminded that eventually the adults in the room will stop listening to them no matter how many Murdochs, Musks and Zuckerbergs keep giving them a megaphone.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Jacinda Ardern, Clarke Gayford, Donald Trump, Christiane Amanpour and Stephen Colbert.

Credits: Directed by Lindsay Utz and Michelle Waltshe. A CNN Films/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:41