After spending years at a psychiatric institution in New York, real-life catatonic Julius Orlovsky is brought back into the care of his brother Peter, who lives with beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg. When Julius wanders off during the shooting of the film, director Robert Frank hires an actor to interpret the part of Julius, thus entering into a fictional account of the man’s psychological portrait. Soon enough, the real Julius reappears. An exploration of the mentally-disturbed, the film juggles in its narrative as well as in its form between the thin line that separates reality from fiction, presence from absence.