"Be Good, Smile Pretty" chronicles filmmaker Tracy Droz Tragos's effort to establish "my own relationship with my father," a Navy lieutenant who died in Vietnam in 1969, when she was 4 months old. Droz Tragos and her mother visit her father's Missouri home town and meet his mother and relatives. Other stops include the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., where she meets with Sen. John Kerry (who calls her father "my comrade"), and Annapolis, for his 35th Naval Academy renunion.