William O’Neal (Stanfield) is a young Chicago ne’er-do-well who gets busted and brought in by the FBI on charges of impersonating a federal agent and stealing a car. Baby-faced G-man Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) gives him two options: Go to jail or infiltrate the Illinois Black Panther chapter and be an informant about what “Chairman Fred†is up to.
Amid the tumultuous political and social unrest of the ‘60s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, under a ton of makeup) founds a counterintelligence program to silence political dissent and prevent “the rise of a Black messiah.” Hampton especially poses a problem for Hoover because he not only speaks up for the Black community nationally in terms of racial injustice and police brutality, he also forms a “Rainbow Coalition†with the white Young Patriots and Latino Young Lords to rally “oppressed brothers and sisters of every color.”