A college professor lives his life with reckless abandon after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
After learning about his terminal diagnosis, a college professor decides to live his life to the fullest by drinking, smoking and expressing real thoughts for the people around him. While going through the stages, he come to terms with the great truth of his life as he mends broken relationships, embraces the people in his life and learns to ignite his inner good spirit.—Santhosh
Professor Richard Brown (Johnny Depp) is in the office of his doctor and receives bleak news concerning his health. He has advanced stage cancer of his lungs which has spread throughout his body with mortal consequences. His life expectancy is set by the doctor as being 6 months without treatment, which might be extended to 12-18 months with aggressive and painful cancer treatment. Richard is devastated by the news, becoming self-abusive in verbal tirades against himself, and walking through town and around campus as if in an emotional stupor.
Upon arrival at home for dinner, Richard decides to tell his wife Veronica (Rosemarie DeWitt) and only daughter Olivia (Odessa Young) the bad news and prepare them for the worst outcome possible. The dinner conversation however takes twisted and unexpected turns. Richard's relationship with his wife is troubled and tortured. His daughter decides to use dinner time to make her own personal announcement that she is LGBT in her orientation and that she has taken a lover. Her mother is not supportive and berates her daughter as going through a phase, which causes Olivia to storm out of the dining room upset by her mother's lack of support. Veronica, Richard's wife, then decides to confront Richard with the fact that she believes that he has been a poor husband and that she has taken a lover on campus who happens to be the Dean of the college where Richard teaches as part of the tenured faculty in the English department. With everyone having argued at the dinner table, Richard never gets to make his medical report of his crisis situation.
At campus the next day, Richard greets his full classroom with a confrontational tone reflecting indirectly the bleakness of his own medical situation. He begins telling the students about the urgency of living life to its fullest and criticizes any number of stereotypes he superficially observes among the students in the classroom. He starts weeding out the students who he feels are there to only get easy good grades, or otherwise seek superficial benefits from a friendly faculty. After over half of the potential classroom students leave the class as being of no interest to them, Richard is left with a core group of students who seem attracted to his unorthodox version of straight talk. They decide to stick with the class and Richard's newly proclaimed unorthodox. Among the students remaining is the niece Claire (Zoey Deutch) of the college Dean Henry Wright (Ron Livingston) who seems to admire Richard for all his differences with her uncle since both of them, Richard and her uncle, are members of the faculty in different departments.
Richard asks his friend, who happens to be his department's Chairman Peter Matthew (Danny Huston) to arrange for a sabbatical leave for him on immediate terms. The Chairman tells him that it is impossible on such short notice, but Richard continues to press him. Finally, Richard tells him that he is dying of cancer and that he has no options but to request the immediate sabbatical leave. The Chairman, who considers Richard a close friend and colleague, says that he will try his best and tries to reassure Richard as best as he can by way of some emotional support.
The classroom for Richard becomes a place for him to vent his frustration with life and to encourage his young students not to fall into the traps and false career paths which he took in his own life. The students are highly responsive with one of the gay students offering Richard some pot brownies and a sexual tryst in Richard's office. Claire, on another occasion, asks Richard for a romantic slow dance at a local club. Richard's reliance on alcohol and recreational drugs in these passing days and weeks after receiving his bad news becomes progressively worse. In one instance, he passes out and needs to be hospitalized because of his extreme intoxication.
One redeeming quality in Richard which surfaces is that he is able to express a warmth to his close family members and remaining friends after his bad news diagnosis which he could not express in the past before his cancer diagnosis. He finally bonds with his daughter by accepting her coming out as LGBT and manages to at least partially patch things up with his wife during a frenzied and spontaneous drug experimentation episode in their home bedroom. The end however seems inevitable as Richard does not take on the doctor's option of using chemotherapy to extend his life by a single year, and Richard decides to leave his home and family on his final sabbatical leave which has been finally approved by his college. Richard decides to take the less traveled path on his own, in his car and with his dog, in order not to be a burden upon his wife and daughter in his final months of life as his cancer rapidly progresses.
