Rock singer Jose Alberto Cruz, nicknamed Tango, is the young man whose music and rebelliousness inspire a generation during the late 1960s in Buenos Aires.
Charismatic and sexy, Tango draws hoards of young people to steamy underground nightclubs by singing of love and freedom, loyalty and peace.
Tango shares the activist views of the students, but he is the product of the "barrio" (hood), where persecution and torture are a way of life.
While being detained by the police for his participation in a student demonstration, Tango meets Mariana, a student committed to freedom but tied to her bourgeois past.
Overcoming their class differences, Tango and Mariana fall in love, only to be dealt a devastating blow when the chief of police tries to use Tango as a pawn in his battle to uncover the leaders of the growing youth movement.
Despite the brutality and despair of his prison experiences, Tango bravely fights on, living in the hope of being free and reunited with Mariana.