Writer-director Susan Lacy establishes the film's sympathetic tone in its opening shots of Bernstein's funeral cortege as it passed along Manhattan streets in 1990. Underscoring the footage is the elegiac second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the final piece conducted by Bernstein at his final performance months earlier at Tanglewood. Scenes from that last concert (and a return to that slow, funereal march) are the inevitable conclusion of Lacy's film, which finds ample drama over the course of approximately two hours.

Lacy traces the arc of Bernstein's career from his earliest triumphs as a young conductor through his Broadway successes (culminating in West Side Story), his historic network television outreach, the frustrations encountered over his "serious" compositions (often derided, ultimately vindicated), and his autumnal work abroad conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Bernstein's private demons--anguish over the tradeoff between a conductor's glory and a composer's productivity, the ridicule invited by his impassioned political activism, the conflict between his devotion to his family and his bisexuality, bouts of depression suffered in his later years--are addressed as well.