Kate, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. She is soon drawn into a Scheherazade-like matrix of tales, some painfully final, some still unfinished, in which the woman gradually offers a heartbreaking account, not only of one family, but of the American century itself, from World War II to Vietnam and the Weather Underground. the story of an unlikely friendship.