We meet an enterprising single mother who risks everything to purchase $6,000 in food to earn enough revenue to pay rent and tuck away start up cash to buy a taco truck. This festival is her claim to the American dream, one forkful of lard at a time. We see the security staff waxing poetic about the American Dream and hustling until the pickings get sweeter.
There’s an elderly white woman who’s watching the festival set up from her window. She speaks into the camera offering a dose of humor and an outsider perspective to the “racket” that will soon envelop her home. Ron Howard arrives in the elderly woman’s home and asks her how is she taking all of the excitement about the festival. The woman responds “I find it particularly annoying.”
After a series of vignettes from the artists the documentary slowly takes shape. The women’s stories take more interesting turns. Janelle Monae tells the director why she wears white-and-black as her uniform in homage to the labor that her mother and father did their entire lives. Santigold talks about her father who grew up in Philadelphia with some challenges as an adolescent becoming an attorney and her mother who picked cotton as a child in Mississippi and later becoming a psychiatrist. This segment sharply contrasted with the ways in which the music industry for so many artists—mostly black—is their way out of the underclass.