Charles Bronson enters Britain's prison system in 1974 with a seven-year sentence for armed robbery, and the film traces how that sentence became a life spent almost entirely behind bars. Interviews with former prison guards, ex-inmates, and psychologists reconstruct a man who fought his way through the system rather than out of it, moved between institutions roughly 120 times and held in solitary confinement for years at a stretch. Each altercation added time to his original sentence, turning a short custodial term into decades of incarceration. The film follows the toll on his personal life too, including the end of his marriage to his first wife, Irene, who left after years of dealing with his imprisonment, and his 1988 release, which lasted only sixty-nine days before another arrest returned him to custody. Rather than treating Bronson only as a curiosity, the film uses his case to ask what the prison system actually does with a prisoner it cannot manage, and what that says about how it handles psychological breakdown more broadly.