Derf Backderf was a high school classmate of Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer arrested in 1991 after murdering seventeen men, most of them young, Black, and gay. Decades later Backderf turned that friendship into the graphic novel "My Friend Dahmer," a project that took nearly twenty years to finish. This film follows how that book came together, using previously unpublished archive material and interviews with Backderf's own school friends to reconstruct the awkward, troubled teenager Dahmer appeared to be before anyone knew what he was capable of. Backderf talks through the difficulty of writing a character study of a future murderer without either excusing him or losing the necessary distance, and about confronting his own memories without guilt for having once simply liked the guy. The documentary treats the book itself as the real subject, tracing how a comic artist spent two decades turning a disturbing personal memory into one of the most discussed true-crime graphic novels in the US.