West Virginia, 1920. Former Wobbly and pacifist labor unionist Joe Kenehan arrives in the town of Matewan to organize a strike among its hard-pressed coal miners. As local tensions and company skulduggery turn the situation into a powder keg, violent confrontation begins to seem grimly inevitable.

John Sayles’s workerist ode to human conscience inverts the period epic to tell history from below, honoring the past with a protest song’s straight-talking moral clarity. Plotted with novelistic expansion, and shot with soot-smeared tactility, Matewan is a high point of American independent cinema.