“Bill” Kunstler was the flamboyant, contentious, proudly revolutionary lawyer for the Chicago Eight, a handsome man with an unruly mane of black-and-white that was as impressive and iconic as the head of hair on Susan Sontag. What’s it like being the young daughters of this John Brown–like presence?
And later on, how do they feel when their King Lear dad seems to have lost his mind and his way, shifting from defending civil-rights and anti-war cases to becoming the mouthpiece for defiant criminals like the 9/11 terrorists and the Mafia’s John Gotti? This is an impressive documentary, both a telling family document (Emily Kunstler directed, Sarah Kunstler produced) and a deserving tribute to the man who, on his best days, stood up for the prisoners in Attica and the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee and marched with Martin Luther King.
