“Free Leonard Peltier,” the new documentary about the imprisoned Indigenous activist, whose life sentence was just commuted to house imprisonment by President Joe Biden days before this film’s Sundance premiere, is a useful primer for viewers new to his case. But it’s not much of a film, and it’s even unclear what kind of film its directors Jesse Short Bull and David France wish it to be.
This is a documentary as a textbook — we’d say it’s like a Wikipedia summary, except checking actual Wikipedia is almost essential for making sense of certain events presented in “Free Leonard Peltier” — providing a broad overview without delving deeper into the humanity of Peltier or why his story matters. It opens in the near-present with Native American activists coming to Washington to plead Peltier’s case, one even saying that overturning Peltier’s conviction has not just been a cause throughout his entire life but throughout the life of his father and grandfather as well.
Much of the rest of the story is told in flashback, so to speak. But it’s not Peltier’s story that’s center stage for much of the film’s first 50 minutes: It’s the story of the entire American Indian Movement (AIM), the grassroots activist organization founded by Dennis Banks in 1968 to protest the ongoing systematic discrimination against Native Americans as carried out by the U.S. government and the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had served as the governing body of their reservations for decades. Poverty, a lack of access to education, and police abuse were common on the reservations at this time (more so even than today).
It’s fascinating seeing footage of the great Russell Means when he was involved with AIM, years before becoming a movie actor. And some of the highlights of AIM’s work presented are events even those with barely any familiarity with this history will recognize, such as AIM’s takeover of Alcatraz island to raise awareness of their goals. But for the longest time, Peltier himself is just a bit player in this story. It’s easy to imagine a re-edit where Short Bull (“Lakota Nation vs. United States”) and France (“How to Survive a Plague”) establish more clearly up front: Why do Peltier and his case matter? Why did that activist (and his father and grandfather) consider Peltier’s case to be a defining cause in his life? “Free Leonard Peltier” ultimately comes around to more or less answering those, but it’s a long way about it. This year’s Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, “Sugarcane,” offers a great counterpoint to “Free Leonard Peltier” in its ability to use the specifics of a particular case to make larger points about Native issues.
Did an archive clip of Marlon Brando talking about his advocacy on behalf of Native Americans really need to be there? Or a clip of Willie Nelson playing a benefit concert on Peltier’s behalf? The temptation to include those speaks to the overall structure of the film: “Free Leonard Peltier” is built largely out of archival clips — contemporaneous news reports and long-ago-conducted interviews, especially. In part, this is because many of the players involved in Peltier’s case are no longer with us. But it heightens the feeling that the history here is being kept at a bit of a distance rather than deeply felt now.
There’s something to be said for this history of AIM that dominates the first half of the film. It at least presents Peltier’s case, which becomes the focus of the second half, as part of a collective struggle, where his persecution is presented as representative of what’s happened to Native Americans writ large. So the fact that the second half of the film largely follows “true crime documentary” beats represents a bit of a jarring shift.
In 1975, Peltier and two other Indigenous men, Darryl Butler and Robert Robideau, were traveling in a red pickup truck on the Pine Ridge Reservation for the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota when they were pursued by two FBI agents in two unmarked cars. Shots were exchanged — the story told by Peltier, Butler, and Robideau was that they thought they were being fired on by “the goons,” the private militia of the reservation’s chairman, Richard Wilson, who ruled via criminal and corrupt tactics. The two FBI agents ended up dead, Butler and Robideau were caught and Peltier fled to Canada. (What actually happened here is presented in such a hazy, unclear way that supplementary reading is all but required.)
Butler and Robideau were acquitted for the point-blank execution style murders of the two FBI agents because their defense team went to great pains to paint a portrait of the poverty and corruption of reservation life that AIM was fighting against. That left Peltier to take the fall. Canada extradited him back to the U.S., and he was convicted of the murders.
This is where “Free Leonard Peltier” goes full “true crime” because suddenly this documentary is about using ballistics studies to prove that it couldn’t have been Peltier’s own AR-15 used to kill the agents. The doc gets so lost in the attempt to clear Peltier that, again, the larger points of the case fall by the wayside: Why is this case significant? What does the way that Peltier was railroaded say about justice for Indigenous Americans overall?
“Everything that’s happened to him is a mirror of what’s happened to Indian people throughout history,” says one activist near the end of the film. That should have been at the front, with a greater effort to connect the dots throughout. “Free Leonard Peltier” is too scattered to provide a satisfactory case of its own.
Grade: C+
“Free Leonard Peltier” world premiered in the Premieres section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
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