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Toxic Hot Seat is, first and foremost, an excellent work of journalism. It’s also an “issue documentary,” a genre that these days has a bit of a bad reputation among some critics. Yet, as this new film from Kirby Walker and James Redford (The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia) proves so articulately, the “film with a cause” isn’t necessarily a discrete concept in the first place. This exposé of the chemical industry and the toxicity and usefulness of flame retardant chemicals plays out more like a political thriller than a plea for your support or your money. Its final moments, driving home the need for reform, are necessitated not by the ethical emphasis of the film but by the importance of narrative closure.

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Much of the film’s success comes from the wise decision to tell two stories simultaneously. Walker and Redford open with a fire house in San Francisco, where retired firefighter Tony Stefani is trying to raise awareness of the shocking prevalence of cancer among his colleagues. Women firefighters in particular contract breast cancer at a rate much higher than the national average. While they don’t initially have proof, it becomes clear that the chemicals released into the air during fires are at fault. The losses sustained by this community and their struggle to explain them pack the biggest emotional punch of Toxic Hot Seat, an arc that for much of the film is kept apart from the parallel developments in the scientific and political fight.

This second narrative begins with the Chicago Tribune, whose “Playing with Fire” series first broke open this whole story. Reporters Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne detail their pursuit of information about the safety and efficacy of flame retardant chemicals and how the industry has been protecting itself since these chemicals were first discovered to be toxic back in the 1970s. There aren’t any secret meetings with whistleblowers in parking garages, but there are plenty of obscure documents, some of them in Swedish. The Tribune talked to everyone they could, including Dr. Vytenis Babrouskas, whose original study is the most important work used to defend the use of flame retardants in furniture. Now he says that it has been misinterpreted and misused, and that California’s standard that requires these chemicals in furniture, TB117, was a mistake. The most commonly used flame retardants not only fill our bodies with toxins, but they don’t really work.