After the death of his mother, Matthew Castillo moves to Los Angeles to begin again. Or rather, that's what he tells himself. In reality, he's trying to outrun the memories of a lost happiness, losing himself instead in the seductive world of his cousin Drake.

Marketers, hustlers, influencers, supermodels – these are just some of the types thriving in Drake's world, a mansion-turned-headquarters of a fitness apparel empire. Hungry young strivers bustle through the house discussing ad campaigns, fixing lights, tilting the heads of America’s most beautiful people. In this world, beauty is cultivated and extracted, then turned into profit in the modern, algorithm-savvy way.

Matthew is relieved. He’s no longer thinking about the past. Then Lizzie, America’s most in-demand girl, arrives to discuss a business deal. Drake’s team quickly launches into the usual choreography of flattery, but it’s all interrupted when Matthew asks her a personal question. Lizzie falters. Her face softens.

That night, she pursues him, drawn to his sincerity. The two begin a relationship where Lizzie finally feels seen as a person. But as Matthew descends into Drake’s world, his innocence fades. And when Lizzie sees this, she leaves him. Devastated again, Matthew turns to Drake who offers his usual “chase success to forget about your mess” prescription. Matthew downs it.

He learns to leverage his natural eye for beauty, his attention to detail, his yearning for a perfection he can't quite put his finger on, but can point to. He can glimpse it. In images – eyes, smiles, laughs. Glances at the camera. He has a sense of it. He exploits it. Turning his artistic sensibilities into tools. Beauty into profit. And as the months pass, he transforms the company into something unrecognizable. He becomes unrecognizable. He and Drake, indistinguishable.

Then one day, a girl named Alice holds a mirror up to what he has become. Filled with remorse, he runs after her and reveals his true self in a moment of true vulnerability. She gives him another chance. Over the course of a summer, the two fall in love. Matthew begins to reclaim his former self. He begins talking about his mother again. Recognizing his sensitivity to beauty, Alice introduces him to her grandpa. 

Edmund Ashford is a force of nature. He’s volatile, yet tender, and fiercely romantic. An old tempestuous British poet who will not tolerate the commodification of beauty, let alone its exploitation. Or, as he would put it, desecration. As soon as Matthew steps into his almost mythic tobacco smoke-filled study, he realizes that two opposing worlds are colliding.

And collide they do. So much that a gun is even drawn at one point. But the two also immediately recognize the beginnings of a beautiful friendship. Because they share a way of seeing that neither of them can articulate. But they recognize it in each other. 

As the summer comes to a close, Matthew falls deeper in love with Alice as well as Edmund’s world. But Alice is leaving soon. She would stay if he asked, and they both know it. But he doesn’t ask. Something holds him back. So she goes.

Devastated, Matthew realizes that he couldn't commit to Alice because he was split between two worlds. One that taught him to consume beauty and one that was teaching him to behold it. On the brink of despair, he goes to Edmund who tells him the story of a young man named John Keats who transfigured his pain into something beautiful. The words land. For the first time, Matthew begins to channel his artistic sensibility into something honest. With Edmund’s help, he begins working on a novel that is ultimately the film we are watching. His narration, his prose. His writing, his processing of grief.

But it’s not ultimately his writing that helps him make sense of it. It’s not ultimately his writing that teaches him to behold. It’s the people at Edmund’s. Because Edmund’s house is an epicenter not just of beauty, but of community.

A community of young families who gather together daily. Matthew gets used to it. To the children running through the house, to Edmund reading them fairy tales, to weekends going by without anyone seeming to realize it. For the first time in his life, Matthew is surrounded by a happiness no one is trying to leverage, perform, or possess. It’s just shared.

Matthew realizes that the memories he was so desperately trying to outrun were never haunting him. They were beckoning him – toward something deeper. After finishing his novel, he goes fishing at the beach. For years, he had fished without catching anything. But on this day, he finally hooks something. He shouts with joy, exhilarated by the moment. But then, he turns and calls out behind him. Two young boys come running into the water. He gives the rod to them.