Based on the best-selling memoir by Samuel Ignatius Millar. Millar was a member of the Irish Republican Army who spent eight years in tough Irish prisons during the late 1970s and 1980s, where he took part in the blanket protest in which political prisoners refused to wear prison garb and were severely punished for it. He then came to America under a different identity, reinventing himself as a family man and comic book shop owner.