How can one recapture one’s lost youth? Made up exclusively of archival images - some fabulous and stylized, others tough to look at - and structured like a musical score in three movements, Francesco Munzi’s compilation film tries to reconstitute the so-called “years of lead” in Italy - the decade following the 1968 protests, when an optimistic and utopian spirit swept over the unfinished wartime conflict between the fascistic right and the Italian left, itself split between anarchism and idealism. The intensity of political and economic frustrations finds a voice in the feverish and emotionally charged editing of an archival material already touched by nostalgia for lost youth.