Charlie Kaufman writes and directs this darkly comic narrative-within-a-narrative drama about a theatre director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is producing a new play on Broadway. In his attempt to say something real in a powerful new way, he gathers an ensemble cast together in a Manhattan warehouse and instructs them to live out their ordinary lives in a studio replica of New York City. As the constructed city grows and starts to take on a life of its own, Caden's own life goes into free fall: his relationships with his wife Claire (Michelle Williams), ex-wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) are all in ruins, and even his therapist, Madeline (Hope Davis), has an agenda at odds to his own. As he becomes more and more involved with his masterpiece, the lines between the world he has created and the real world become hopelessly blurred.