Stanley Kubrick left behind thousands of boxes crammed into his English estate, filled with research files, fan mail, props, and correspondence from a career spent obsessively preparing films that sometimes never got made. Journalist Jon Ronson gets access to the archive after Kubrick's death and starts opening them, turning up files on subjects as odd as doorknobs and Napoleon, alongside the meticulous location scouting and casting research behind films like Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. Interviews with Kubrick's family, former assistants, and collaborators fill in the man behind the boxes: a director who reportedly kept files on journalists who wrote about him and who treated pre-production as an act of near-total control. Ronson's own fascination drives the film as much as Kubrick's legend does, and the boxes themselves, some never opened until now, become the real subject: a physical record of a mind that couldn't stop gathering information before it could start shooting.