Barack Obama's rise from Hawaii and Chicago to the Illinois State Senate is the subject of this cable-television biography, produced before he entered the race for the presidency. The film traces his mixed-race upbringing, his father's absence and death in Kenya, his years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, and his path through Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. Interviews and archival footage cover his marriage to Michelle Obama, his entry into Illinois politics, and the speeches that built his early reputation as a rising figure in the Democratic party. Made for television in the standard biography format, it relies on talking-head commentary and news clips rather than original investigation, giving a straightforward account of a career still in progress at the time of filming. It works as a time capsule of how Obama was being introduced to a national audience before the campaign that would define him.