It chronicles the fall from grace of a fictional heroic Polish bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), who became the Stakhanovite symbol of an over-achieving worker, in Nowa Huta, a new (real life) socialist city near Kraków.

Agnieszka, played by Krystyna Janda in her first role, is a young filmmaker who is making her diploma film (a student graduation requirement) on Birkut, whose whereabouts seem to have been lost two decades later.

[1] Man of Marble reflects director Wajda's emerging hostility to the Stalinist cultural establishment and its oppressive restrictions on artistic expression.

[2] Agnieszka is a young filmmaker who is making her film thesis on Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer elevated as a hero in a political stunt to increase construction efficiency and brick quotas.

Selected by Jodla, the local Party Secretary, Birkut's fame spread from the bricklaying record of 30,000 bricks in one shift launched him to stardom.

He shares the details of an accident which stopped Birkut from continuing his bricklaying feats: A heated brick was mixed in with the rest, burning his hands badly.

It is somewhat of a surprise that Wajda would have been able to make such a film, sub silentio attacking the socialist realism of Nowa Huta, revealing the use of propaganda and political corruption during the period of Stalinism.

Agnieszka has trouble making the film from archival sources and museum collections and from interviews with people whose answers provide partial information on Birkut's life, but who don't seem to know about his current location or situation.

Agnieszka's father speculates that there must be a single specific reason for the authorities' fear of further disclosure and suggests that she should locate Birkut and talk to him to find out more, even if she is no longer involved in making the film.

In his script, Wajda had wanted to reveal that Mateusz had been killed in clashes at the shipyards in 1970, a major confrontation that prefigured the rise of Solidarity ten years later, but he was prevented by censorship.

The film also presciently anticipates the future development of the Solidarity union movement by ending with a scene in which Agnieszka finally manages to meet Maciek, Birkut’s son, in front of the gates of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk (where workers stage a historic strike in 1980, precipitating a major crisis for the Stalinist officialdom).