On February 4, 1974, college student Patty Hearst (granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst), was kidnapped from her apartment by a terrorist group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA, seeking to foment a violent uprising within America's working class, forced the Hearst family to donate millions of dollars in food to the poor. But two months after her kidnapping, Patty emerged in public as Tania, an armed member of the SLA who helped her captors to rob a bank. Director Robert Stone uses rare and previously unseen archive footage as well as interviews with former SLA members to explain "America's first encounter with modern media-driven political terrorism."