Anarchism gets treated in America as either a foreign import or a native tradition, and this film argues it is both, tracing the movement from nineteenth-century individualist thinkers to the immigrant radicals who brought their own strain of it across the Atlantic. Rare archival footage covers strikes, trials, and street organizing, while interviews put two very different anarchist voices on screen: Murray Bookchin, the social theorist working out of the left-libertarian tradition, and Karl Hess, the former Goldwater speechwriter who found his way to anarchism from the right. Their disagreements do a lot of the film's explaining, showing how wide the term actually stretches. Live performance footage of the Dead Kennedys brings the history up to the punk era, framing anarchism as a live current rather than a closed chapter. The film's case is that the popular image of the bomb-throwing anarchist obscures a much longer, more American argument about individual liberty and resistance to authority.