On the eve of World War II, Italian-American Maria Lagana is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart, as the studio teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Soon Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as screenwriters, and refugee actors playing the very villains they fled. But when the arrival of a stranger from the past threatens Maria's carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate—and her own.