This biopic depicts troubled actress Frances Farmer's Seattle childhood, college years, political involvement, show business success, doomed love affair with playwright Clifford Odets, and her eventual mental breakdown.

Based on the fast and frantic life of actress Frances Farmer tracing her life from her childhood in Seattle, through her college years, her flirtation with radical politics, her success in films and the theater, her doomed love affair with Clifford Odets, her physical and mental breakdown, and her ultimate emergence from an institution where she spent five years, to her death from cancer.—Matthew Patay