Last month, the US Senate intelligence committee published over 1,000 pages of findings on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In a different world – or, at least, a more sane one, the kind oriented away from the distrustful chaos desired by Russian intelligence – the bipartisan report would have landed with the frisson of anticipation surrounding the Mueller report in April 2019. But in a hyper-polarized, disaster-numbed nation, its relatively damning findings faded quickly under at least seven layers of justifiably frantic news cycles.

Agents of Chaos, a two-part investigative HBO series on Russian interference in the 2016 election, confirms some of the most damning findings of the Senate report – for one, extensive contacts between the Trump campaign, particularly former manager Paul Manafort, and “a cadre of individuals ostensibly operating outside of the Russian government but who nonetheless implement Kremlin-directed influence operations.” But the series, from Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, also visualizes, with first-person interviews from some of the major figures, what the rare bipartisan consensus (on facts, not narrative) cannot: the diffuse, dubiously quantifiable efforts by the Russian government – sometimes tightly organized, sometimes slapdash – to sow chaos in Ukraine and then America, the profit motives which compelled bumbling Trump figures into a “collusion” of mutual interest, and the head-spinning vertigo for average American consumers over what even happened four years ago.

“There’s tremendous pressure to make sense of it quickly, rather than saying, ‘Something happened, but we don’t know yet what it means,’” Gibney told the Guardian of the drive since 2016 to pin down an easily digestible, solid narrative of Russian interference. “People would jump very quickly to say, ‘This is what it means’. And I think it’s that search for quick meaning that lead so many people down the road to conspiracy theory.”

Agents of Chaos finds no single story, operation, locus of blame, or clear measure of impact by the Russian government. Instead, it explores a common purpose employed by both Russia and pro-Trump players in the US, sometimes in tandem and sometimes covertly. “Using chaos to amass power,” said Gibney.

The four-hour series takes a broad look at Russian interference, delineating strategies that often get conflated into one enemy – an oil slick of reports and testimony difficult to pin into verifiable coherence. Gibney classifies efforts by the Russian government or Russian business interests – given the top-down structure of corruption in the country, it’s difficult to discern the two – to sow chaos in America into four categories: disinformation campaigns orchestrated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the so-called “troll factory” which injected divisive meme campaigns and partisan accounts into American social media discourse; sophisticated cyber-attacks, such as the one by the GRU, a Russian government intelligence agency, which leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016; Russian hackers’ infiltration into state election systems, which are criminally out of date and vulnerable to manipulation; and stoking an information system primed for outrage by widely broadcasting and encouraging support for an inexperienced showman and would-be oligarch named Donald Trump.

The connections between Trump and Putin, explored in the second episode, constitute a “seduction between two like-minded people,” said Gibney, rather than the now-fraught word “collusion.” Trump initially was after a Moscow tower deal. For Putin and the Russian political system, a destabilized America is a less powerful one.

“It’s all about greed, and avarice, and corruption,” said Gibney. “The agents of chaos in both countries had common interests.”

Agents of Chaos fleshes out a “three-ring circus” of interference efforts with a who’s who of state and security actors, including former employees of the “troll farm” in Russia and a Russian journalist whose investigations into Putin associates earned him death threats, credible security concerns, and a severed bull head delivered to his office. Gibney interviews several top-level intelligence officials, such as lead prosecutor of the Mueller investigation Andrew Weissmann, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, former CIA director John Brennan, and Celeste Wallander, the former National Security Council director under Obama and a Russian foreign policy expert. Private investigator Glenn Simpson, who authorized the controversial and sensational dossier by Christopher Steele, speaks to Manafort’s shady connections to a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska.

And now-familiar names from the Trump orbit, including disgraced adviser Carter Page and Felix Sater, the Russian-American businessman determined to build a Trump tower in Moscow, offer their versions of the mess.

For those who have their finger on each sluggish inch of the Trump campaign’s overtures to Russian interests – so much as hard evidence exists for a connection whose symbiosis required no explicit statement of purpose – the series will answer or explicate on outstanding questions: that the FBI’s investigation into Russian cyber-attacks began in 2014, with evidence of its activity in Ukraine, not in 2016; that security officials under Obama considered significant counter-measures to Russian hacking, including releasing sensitive information on Russian officials, but ultimately decided against it; that the FBI’s investigation into Trump officials began as a reaction to reports that the campaign knew about Russian hacking of the Democrats when only the FBI was aware of the attacks.

But for the many viewers who know “Russian interference” as a frustrating and slippery murk, one difficult to parse without particular expertise, Agents of Chaos offers a crash-course – a four-hour lecture series that attempts to see Russian cyber-security, America’s vulnerabilities, and missed opportunities clearly.

“The Mueller report tried so hard not to tell a story that it failed,” said Gibney. “Because it just presented facts as if it was one magnificent phone book, and the phone book contains lots of facts, but it doesn’t have much of a story.”

Which isn’t to say Agents of Chaos finds conspiracy so much as evidence of mutual greed, and a literacy of the hunger for power; many in the Trump orbit’s goal was “just to make money,” said Gibney, “and in pursuit of that, they end up doing a lot of things that people misinterpreted as being somehow policy-based or enmeshed in some kind of spy game.”

The efforts by the Trump campaign, from George Papadopoulos to Manafort to Page, are more bumbling and obvious than a 1,000-page, buttoned-up Senate report would suggest. “It’s both more ridiculous and more corrupt than I had originally thought,” said Gibney of the Trump associates. “I thought of it initially as a John le Carré novel, but it turned out to be more like the Godfather, or the gang who shouldn’t shoot straight.”

Agents of Chaos finds the Russian efforts, as well, to be both more scattershot and insidious than many would assume. “People are always looking for the strategy,” says Wallander in the second episode. “That fundamentally misunderstands a Russian operation. They seed multiple elements, and then they go with what works.”

Arguably, what worked best is the entrenchment of the perception that Russia could have a consequential impact on America’s election. As the New Yorker argued this month, the loose murk of the Russian meddling story, which easily lends to conspiracy and distrust, is more important than quantifiable impact. Regardless of debates on quantifying impact, “if the goal is disruption and confusion, then being seen to affect outcomes is as good as actually affecting outcomes.”

Which is why Gibney ultimately directs Agents of Chaos, and the lessons of the 2016 election for 2020, back to American soil, and its crumbling institutions. In 2016, “our institutions – the press, a sense of the rule of law, and a bifurcated, belief-based, tribal political system – had become so dysfunctional that were ripe for the picking,” he said.

“Unless we start fixing some of these problems, we’re done.”

• Agents of Chaos premieres on HBO on 23 September with a UK date to be announced