The film documents these events with footage of individuals who were highly important to the movement including but not limited to Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey P.

[2]The footage includes appearances by Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Louis Farrakhan, Emile de Antonio, Richard Nixon, Ingrid Dahlberg and Angela Davis who also provides contemporary voice commentary.

Additional contemporary voice commentaries are provided by Erykah Badu, Ahmir Questlove Thompson, who is also credited with scoring the music for the film along with Om'Mas Keith,[1] Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, John Forté, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, Robin Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole and Melvin Van Peebles.

[3] Mark Jenkins of NPR has commented that the prominence of music artists rather than political activists who provide commentary throughout the film is "a sign of how African-American culture has shifted".

Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch opined that the "'Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975' is a potent time capsule, but without a skeleton of facts and figures, it's a deficient history lesson".

[13] NPR acknowledged that the film "includes plenty of interest, but it would be stronger if the filmmakers had dug a little deeper into the footage from 1967 to 1972 and skipped the final years altogether".

[14] Given this commentary, it is apparent that two of the historical events that the film does a particularly fine job of covering is that of the Civil Rights Movement and the effects of the War on Drugs.

The most telling aspect of the film which reveals the strong thematic presence of the Civil Rights Movement from the beginning is its early depiction of Martin Luther King Jr.

In the most touching and arresting scene in 'Mixtape,' he interviews his mother, Mable, gently prodding her to talk about the effects of poverty and discrimination on her family".

An interview with Louis Farrakhan is eerie in its fantastical delusions and the documentary's uncritical attitude towards the idea that the Nation of Islam offers a disciplined lifestyle heralds the arrival of a number of bizarre conspiracy theories including the somewhat inconsistent view that the authorities both turned a blind-eye to the drug trade in Black areas and cracked down on the drug trade in Black areas in a way that damaged the community and undermined the pursuit of civil rights.

[22]Craig Detweiler of Paste offers similar sentiments in his review of the film, suggesting that drugs are portrayed in the documentary as a way that Black communities were placated in the midst of all the anger from the movement.

[23] The film also includes a scene in the 1974 section that depicts a young woman explaining her fight with heroin addiction and its prominence in the community.