Legal scholar Joel Bakan's book supplies the premise: if a corporation were a person, what kind of person would it be? The film runs that question through a checklist used by psychiatrists, and the pattern that emerges looks like a diagnosis. Interviews carry the argument, including Milton Friedman defending shareholder profit as the only legitimate duty of a firm, Ray Anderson describing his own company's environmental record as reckless, and Noam Chomsky tracing the corporation's legal status as a 'person' back to a nineteenth-century court ruling. The film moves through sweatshop labor, IBM's dealings with Nazi Germany, the patenting of genes and seeds, and a Fox News lawsuit over reporting on bovine growth hormone in milk. Rather than a single villain, it assembles a structure: an institution legally bound to pursue profit above other concerns, regardless of who runs it. Interview subjects span CEOs, whistleblowers, economists, and critics, and the film lets the contradictions between them sit unresolved rather than forcing a verdict.