Tappeiner was smart enough to keep the perfunctory survey of the artist's early and mid-career concise and well focused. Although his formal economy may strike some minimalist notes, Serra was never deeply invested in fulfilling Greenberg or Fried's prophecy of media purity for sculpture. His approach was far more influenced by an Eastern reading of process art, particularly the writing of philosopher Tadashi Suzuki. During a telling cameo, Philip Glass explains this generation's desire to render process and structure as the work's exclusive form.

Serra describes his own career as a romance with steel. Like so young artists emerging with a formal training in their chosen line of work, Serra speaks of once trying to imitate the trends of his time and missing the mark. A summer's employment in a steel mill became the catalyst that individuated him. His occasional slips into the jargon of engineering reveal his deep engagement with steel and how much of his work obeys, respects, and harnesses the medium's inherent properties. A boyish enthusiasm raises Serra's pitch during a voiceover for the foundry footage. As men pull glowing liquid steel from the flames, he compares these place to "bakeries that have gone into alchemy."

Serra's words are as heavy as his sculptures. The final section of the film features his thoughts on installation, interacting with his works and more broadly on art and politics. One starts to feel that dread from college ten minutes before the lecture's end. The professor is busy packing on the final bullet points but you've already reached your threshold for absorption.

This film is about substance over glitter. It would almost seem that Tappeiner's work has itself absorbed the heavy aesthetic of her subject. Such density assumes a long attention span on the part of the viewer, which is a more of a Teutonic than American virtue. In an era when so many films on artists feel like sugar highs of fame and glamour, it's refreshing and satisfying to get some steak for thought.