Coming after Patty Hearst's own book and Paul Schrader's movie version, which detailed her version of events, this tells a bigger story. Robert Stone uses interviews with Russ Little and Mike Bortin, SLA members not involved in the kidnapping, and wittily ends with a clip of Hearst doing a bland interview on UK TV, cutting her off after the preliminaries.
An extraordinary amount of news footage is unearthed, covering not only high-profile incidents but also the early media circus. The irony is that the SLA got what they wanted (publicity) on such a huge scale, they didn't know what to do with it. Stone shows the consequences of bizarre stunts like forcing Patty's father Randolph Hearst to underwrite a massive free food drive (a messy riot), and the stunning ineptitude of the FBI and police.
As with many '70s documents, some cringe moments feature hair and clothes, but a current of 'what on Earth were they thinking?' underruns the whole story.