Michael Jackson vanishes from public view after his 2005 acquittal on child molestation charges, and journalist Jacques Peretti spends two years trying to find him. The trail leads to a suburban house outside Las Vegas, where Peretti gets no further than the front gates, and to an auction of Jackson memorabilia so diminished from its former value that only a handful of bidders show up. Unable to reach Jackson himself, Peretti instead interviews the people who watched his decline up close: lifelong friend J. Randy Taraborrelli and former manager Bob Jones, both of whom insist the "Wacko Jacko" tabloid persona was a media fabrication rather than the real man. Peretti largely takes that claim at face value, while still tracing how Jackson's grip on reality and on his own career loosened to the point where Vegas hotels wanted nothing to do with a comeback. The film's real subject is the mechanics of a fall: how a acquitted icon with no criminal record ends up broke, reclusive, and untouchable within two years.