Richard is a 17-year-old kid from New Jersey with the gift of the gab and an eye for the ladies. He's bored with school and dreams of making it big in the dazzling world of 1930s Manhattan. Miraculously, he bumps into Orson Welles outside the yet-to-open Mercury Theatre a week before Welles' history-making production of Julius Caesar, and is hired on the spot for a walk-on part.

Suddenly Richard finds himself a heady world of high-stakes theatre and highly-strung celebrities, swapping bawdy jokes with Joe 'the Fertilizer' Cotten, sweet-talking the gorgeous production assistant Sonja, attempting to master the ukulele, staying up all night and lying to his mother.

But this is the world of the colossally talented, fearsomely charming, ruthless and ambitious Orson Welles, and by the end of the week, Richard must decide if this is really the world where he wants to live.