About film

Considered by many to be the world’s greatest chess player, Bobby Fischer was the mad genius and rock star of the chess world, but died in squalor as a paranoid recluse. He paid a huge price for his fame, with both his tumultuous rise and fall bringing him to Iceland. With dramatic archival footage and revealing interviews, director Liz Garbus unfolds a stranger-than-fiction story. The FBI had a file on his emotionally absent Jewish single mother, and the KGB had a file on him. Fischer’s spectacular win against Spassky catapulted him to superstardom and ended Soviet domination of the chess world. His later bizarre behavior spewing anti-Semitic and anti-American invective is framed against the breakdowns of earlier chess grandmasters, suggesting Fischer’s brilliance was inextricably linked to his madness.