Joseph Harris, a legendary but troubled playwright, comes to a small Michigan town at Christmastime to mount his latest play. Greeting the cynical New Yorker is a young, aspiring writer who challenges his literary hero to be the icon he’d hoped for. Harris wants no part of Michigan or its small-town theater, and he has no interest in being the young man’s hero. As soon as he arrives, Harris makes plans to return to New York on the next train out. Desperate and scrambling to keep him in town, the young man must face his hero and explore the tangled relationship between the dreams of youth and the wisdom of age.

Judith, a small-town senior on the verge of graduation, struggles against the pressure of her strict religious upbringing and is pushed to extreme lengths when a terrible event brings her entire world crashing down.