Founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party grew from a local patrol watching police for signs of brutality into a national organization with chapters across the country, free breakfast programs, and a paramilitary image built on leather jackets, berets, and open-carry shotguns. Stanley Nelson's film traces that arc through interviews with former members including Kathleen Cleaver and Ericka Huggins, journalists who covered the party, and FBI files documenting COINTELPRO's campaign to destroy it from within. Archival news footage covers the Sacramento capitol protest, the shootout that killed Bobby Hutton, and the split between Newton and Eldridge Cleaver that fractured the party. The film does not flatten the Panthers into either martyrs or villains, letting former members describe both the community programs they built and the internal violence and paranoia that took hold as infiltration and surveillance intensified. It closes with the party's decline in the late 1970s, leaving the question of what the Panthers actually accomplished open to the people who lived it.