Nikola Tesla arrives in America in 1884 with four cents in his pocket and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, and within a decade he has built the alternating current system that Edison spent his career fighting. This film traces Tesla's rise from Edison's laboratory to his partnership with George Westinghouse, the AC-versus-DC fight that culminated at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and the wireless power experiments at his Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe towers. Interviews with historians and Tesla biographers fill in the science behind polyphase current and radio transmission, while archival photographs and dramatized scenes cover his increasingly strange later years, the broken deal with J.P. Morgan, and his death in a New York hotel room in obscurity and debt. The film treats Tesla neither as pure victim nor pure mad genius, laying out how a man who lit the modern world ended up feeding pigeons in Bryant Park with almost nothing to his name.