The Daily Show's Jon Stewart makes his directorial debut with the true story of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari (played by Gael GarcÌa Bernal), whose appearance on Stewart's show in 2009 precipitated his five-month imprisonment by the Iranian government.

Bahari was imprisoned, interrogated, and beaten in Iran for 118 days in 2009 on charges that he was attempting to stage the overthrow of the Iranian government. One of the pieces of "evidence" that Bahari's Iranian captors held against him as proof of his guilt was footage from a "Daily Show" segment in which he was interviewed by Jason Jones pretending to be a spy. After he was released, Bahari was interviewed on "The Daily Show" by Jon Stewart, who discussed the role that the show had (inadvertently) played in his imprisonment. Stewart and Bahari became friendly, and Stewart decided to adapt Bahari's 2011 book "Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity and Survival" (cowritten with Aimee Molloy) into a screenplay.