Inspired by Meinhof's rhetoric, radical communists Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader mastermind the Frankfurt department store firebombings of 1968.

While covering their trial, Meinhof is moved by the radicals' commitment and befriends Ensslin during a prison interview before leaving her husband for radical-linked journalist Peter Homann.

After spending some time abroad, Baader, Ensslin, and Proll move in with Meinhof, who begins advocating violent action but does not wish to leave her two children.

However, under Herold's command, the police respond in force to the RAF's activities and many members, including Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Holger Meins, are arrested and imprisoned.

Meinhof, suffering from depression and remorse over the deaths caused by the RAF's bombings, is subjected to sadistic emotional abuse by Baader and Ensslin, leading her to hang herself; the others falsely claim she was killed by the government.

Upon completing her sentence in 1977, Brigitte Mohnhaupt takes over command of the RAF and organizes the assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback as revenge for Meins and Meinhof's "murders".

Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht also attempt to kidnap Dresdner Bank president Jürgen Ponto, but they kill him when he fights back.

When the film opened in Germany last year, some younger viewers came out of theaters crestfallen that the Red Army Faction members, still mythologized, were such dead-enders.

The website's critical consensus states, "Intricately researched and impressively authentic slice of modern German History, with a terrific cast, assured direction, and a cracking script".

[7] The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a favourable review, praising the acting and storytelling, but also noting a lack of character development in certain parts.

He singled out what he considered "the filmmakers' decision to strike against Hollywood's usual practice of glamorizing Marxist insurgents" by making an explicit connection between revolutionary and criminal violence.

By slowly erasing the difference between the two, Hitchens wrote, the film exposed the "uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty, and between casual or cynical attitudes to both," as well as the RAF's tendency to offer unquestioning support to the most extreme factions of the Marxist and Islamist underground.

In their explanatory statement the committee says: "the film tries to do justice to the terrorists as well as to the representatives of the German state by describing both sides with an equally objective distance."

[15] He later amended this statement after seeing the film, but expressed regret that The Baader-Meinhof Complex concentrates almost exclusively on members of the RAF, which carried the danger that viewers would identify too strongly with the protagonists.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Schleyer expressed a belief that The Baader-Meinhof Complex accurately portrays the RAF, for the first time in a German film, as, "a ruthless and merciless gang of murderers."