The film features the voices of Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber, James Urbaniak, and Jeffrey Wright in an animated reenactment of the trial based on transcripts and rediscovered audio recordings.

It also contains archival footage of Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, William Kunstler, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, and Leonard Weinglass, and of the protest and riot itself.

The defendants represented a broad cross-section of the anti-war movement, from counter-culture icons Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, to renowned pacifist David Dellinger.

"[4] Morgen explained to Chicago Magazine that the inclusion of music by artists such as Black Sabbath, Rage Against the Machine, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem is because "I don’t think of this as a movie about 1968 at all.

Jim Emerson of RogerEbert.com gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, and wrote: Through the kaleidoscopic prism of Brett Morgen's uproarious Chicago 10, a zippy mixture of documentary footage and motion-capture animation, we see how the confrontations between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention played out as political theater...[d]uring the trial, the defendants turned Judge Julius Hoffman's kangaroo courtroom into the stage for a wild farce, complete with kisses, costumes and paper airplanes....

Through the prism of this movie we can see how [Abbie] Hoffman's satirical brand of 'political theater,' a concept he did not invent but adeptly exploited, may have seemed both cynical and naive at the time, but was keenly perceptive, even prescient.