Filmmaker Chuck Workman explores the lives, works and influence of four leading lights of the "Beat Generation" of the 1950s: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Cutting back and forth between archival footage of his subjects and readings of selections from the authors' works, he creates a fast-paced collage of images that show how the Beats became the dominant counter-cultural movement of the last half of America's 20th century.