Sorkin's film dramatizes the 1969 trial of seven prominent anti-Vietnam War activists in Chicago. Originally there were eight defendants, but one, Bobby Seale, was severed from the trial by Judge Julius Hoffman--after Hoffman had ordered Seale bound and gagged in court.

The defendants were a mix of counterculture revolutionaries such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and political activists such as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger, the last a longtime pacifist who was a generation older than the others. Their lawyers argued that the right to free speech was on trial, whether that speech concerned lifestyles or politics.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Frank Langella, and Mark Rylance, among others, directed by Aaron Sorkin. This book is Sorkin's screenplay, the first of his movie screenplays ever published.