Timothy Leary teaches psychology at Harvard in the early 1960s, then turns his research toward a substance barely known outside clinical circles: LSD. The film follows his shift from academic experiments on prison inmates, testing whether psilocybin could reduce reoffending, to his own use of the drug, which convinces him that a lab setting cannot capture what it does. Allen Ginsberg appears as one of Leary's first outside subjects, taking psilocybin under his supervision and carrying enthusiasm for the experience straight into Beat literary circles, which helps push psychedelics toward the wider counterculture. The film tracks Leary's dismissal from Harvard and the arrests that follow as he moves from professor to public advocate, framing LSD as a tool for reshaping consciousness rather than a recreational drug. It sets his personal story against the era's shift from unregulated academic drug research to prohibition and moral panic, and it treats his legacy as unresolved: part serious scientist, part self-made icon of psychedelic rebellion.