Is it an opera or a documentary? An interview or an intervention? A dream or a wake? Contending with a hostile documentary film crew, Broadway composer Robbie Doerfler prepares for a backer's audition with his best friends Roger and Rose.

This "operadoc" combines the rhetoric of live performance documentary and narrative cinema to dissect the tropes that have become associated with both. The conventions of stage script and screenplay are turned inside-out in order to examine the narratives that creative artists and audiences create to derive a sense of self-worth and to come to grips with the creative process. If, during its first moments, it reads like an interview with Robbie, an irascible middle-aged composer whose best years are behind him, the film immediately expands into a trio of mid-life crises, and a meditation on the role that the evolving idea of "originality" plays in the private, personal narratives that commercial and fine artists tell themselves to justify their life decisions. As the "musical about musicals" is rehearsed, it gradually takes on the role of MacGuffin, so that, by the time the "live backer's audition" with which the film climaxes unfolds, Robbie is speaking the actions in the script of the staged musical and the screenplay as they transpire.