Steve Kurtz is a Buffalo art professor whose wife dies suddenly in her sleep. When paramedics find the petri dishes and bacteria cultures he uses in his bioart installations, they call the FBI, and Kurtz spends the next four years fighting federal charges under the Patriot Act. Director Lynn Hershman Leeson tells the story as a hybrid, mixing real interviews with Kurtz, his lawyers, and fellow members of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble with reenacted scenes played by actors, including Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan standing in for Kurtz and his late wife Hope. The device lets the film show what surveillance and prosecution actually looked like from inside the case while Kurtz himself narrates and reacts on camera to events he lived through. The result sits somewhere between documentary and courtroom drama, using dramatization to fill gaps the record can't show, while treating the underlying case, its FBI raid, grand jury, and mail-fraud charges, as verified fact.