Competitive air guitar starts, improbably, in a New York strip club before growing into an annual world championship held in Oulu, Finland. The film follows American contestants training and competing for a shot at becoming the country's first World Air Guitar Champion, treating the mock-shredding as a real discipline with technique, stagecraft, and years of practice behind it. Footage moves between qualifying rounds in the US and the finals overseas, where national pride turns a novelty contest into something closer to an international rivalry, with US and other countries' competitors sizing each other up before judges and crowds. Interviews with the players reveal the community built around the sport, its inside jokes, rituals, and genuine camaraderie, alongside the tension that surfaces when patriotism gets tangled up with performance. The film stays close to a handful of contestants' personal stakes rather than treating the championship as pure spectacle, and it uses the competition structure, heats, judging criteria, a home crowd in Finland, to give an absurd premise a real shape.