Written with the participation of the Replacement's key members, including reclusive singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg, bassist Tommy Stinson, and the family of late guitarist Bob Stinson, Mehr creates a deeply intimate and nuanced portrait that exposes the primal factors and forces-- addiction, abuse, fear-- that would shape one of the most brilliant and notoriously self-destructive groups of all time. He tracks the group as they rise within the early '80s American underground, chronicles the making of their albums, and shows how their addictions first came to define them and then nearly destroyed them.