Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful theatrical run in his hometown of Schenectady, New York, Caden decides to trade in the suburban spectators and local theater for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Awarded a "Genius" grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan's theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mockup of the city outside.

As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden's own life veers wildly off the tracks. The shadow of his ex-wife Adele, a celebrated painter who left him years ago for Germany’s art scene, sneers at him from every corner. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend, Maria. Caden is helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire into the ground while neglecting his second daughter. Sammy Barnathan, the actor Caden hires to play himself within the play, is a bit too perfect for the part, and makes it difficult for Caden to revive his relationship with the alluringly candid box office girl, Hazel. Meanwhile, his therapist, Madeline Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than counseling him. And a mysterious condition begins systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.

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“I take my work very seriously, and there is this stupid system in place that suggests that the director is the auteur and that the writer is just this secondary along for the ride,” he said. “It’s less about trying to be successful than just saying that I am a smart guy, I have a good idea, and I know this script better than anyone, so I am going to take on this movie. It could have been a failure, but that wasn’t really what I was thinking about.”

The film is truly about our conscious effort to live life. It explores the fact that any attention given to our own existence somehow makes it less authentic. In trying to be true to ourselves, we become someone other than ourselves trying too hard to be whoever we think we are.

There’s a particularly funny and razor sharp moment where an actor walks by Caden on the immense set of the “play”. The actor is not, as far as we know, on stage in that moment, and yet, Caden stops him with the director’s note “No one would ever walk like that.” The actor apologizes, goes back a few paces and tries again, looking far less authentic and far more self-conscious than he was the first time. “No,” Caden remarks, “Keep working on it.” Before we cut to another scene we see the actor cross once more, this time more ridiculously than either of the previous attempts. The film is a metaphysical/anthropological refutation of statements like “act natural” and “just be yourself.”