Michael Mabius is a young writer who has experienced great success and great failure. He has hobbled a once-soaring literary career with the heavy burdens of too many drugs, too much sex, and the tragic wasting that comes with time-consuming, enervating social interactions among too many friends who are no friends at all. Now, to save himself, he needs two things - to write the great book he has known all his life he must write, and to live once again with the only woman he has ever loved - Susan. But Susan has recently married another man, though Michael refuses to accept this fact. And Michael's creative energies are being poured out in writing dialog for cartoon rodents to say in hopeless films, so he can earn the money to pay for the drugs that provide him with the only traces of warmth left in his world.