Coal miners at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky walk off the job in June 1973 after the Eastover Mining Company refuses to sign a contract with the United Mine Workers of America, and director Barbara Kopple stays with them for the strike's duration, more than a year of picket lines, gunfire, and stalled negotiations. Her crew gets access most labor films never manage: inside the miners' homes, in the middle of confrontations with strikebreakers and armed company men, alongside the wives who organize their own picket line after the men are jailed or hurt. Archival footage and traditional labor songs pull the story back to earlier UMWA fights and the black lung disease that shortens miners' lives underground, so the Brookside strike reads as one round in a much older fight. The camera does not stay safely outside the violence; one nighttime confrontation on the picket line ends with a shot fired. The film closes with the strike settled but the poverty and danger of coal country largely unchanged.