In 1933 Texas, a schoolteacher and aspiring writer meets a pulp fiction writer, and a relationship soon develops between the two, but it is doomed by his slavishly devotion to his ailing mother and insistence on his freedom.

In Texas in the 1930s, young schoolteacher Novalyne Price (Renée Zellweger) meets a handsome, eccentric, interesting young man named Robert E. Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio). He's a successful writer of the pulp stories of "Conan the Barbarian", and she's an aspiring one. A friendship develops into a sort of courtship. Based on a memoir by Novalyne Price.—Eileen Berdon <[email protected]>