[2] Anger synopsizes the film thus: "A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a 'light' and is drawn through the needle's eye.

The dreamer appears with a Christmas tree as a headdress, moving toward a fireplace in which several photographs of the opening shot are burning.

During the Zoot Suit Riots, Anger witnessed a group of sailors in white uniforms chase down Mexican men and attack them.

[4][5] Ed Earle, a friend of Anger's, has disputed this account, saying that the cast were not sailors, but "people dressed up…He talked everyone into doing it because it was almost as though he was going to make the ultimate porno film.

Worried that he might get in trouble trying to sell prints of Fireworks by mail, he scratched out his genitals from one brief shot in a public urinal.

The dreamer in the film follows a symbolic process of death, rebirth, and self-realization similar to the Liber Pyramidos, a ritual for self-initiation.

[13] Anger's camp re-creation is emphasized with intense, expressionistic lighting of the subject against a dark background; thunder and lightning; and a dolly shot that gradually reveals the scene.

These edits included truncating a scene where the dreamer writhes on a bathroom floor before the sailors attack him and shortening the moment when Gordon Gray unbuttons his pants to reveal a firecracker.

The use of color bridged Fireworks with Anger's later film Eaux d'Artifice, which similarly ends with a hand-tinted object.

William C. Doran served as prosecutor, with much of his case focusing on the Coronet and its homosexual patrons rather than the content of the film.

Doran zeroed in on the sailor with a firecracker and, despite the lack of nudity in Fireworks, persistently referred to it as "the penis scene".

[17][22] Civil rights attorney Stanley Fleishman appealed the decision to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Rohauer.

[26] Critic Lewis Jacobs of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the taboo subject matter was effectively conveyed through "the film's intensity of imagery, the strength and precision of its shots and continuity," making Fireworks a work of "rare individuality which no literal summary of its qualities can communicate.