WRITER’S NOTE: “Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goethe might've added, “...no matter how stupid.” We might be better off in life had we done things differently. But then we wouldn't have these incredible stories to tell. And this film would never happen, a film about generational trauma and learning to value one's life, based almost entirely on actual events.
 

LOGLINE: A young broken-hearted musician escapes his troubles in America by seeking a new life as a fashion model in Europe where, instead of glamour, he runs out of money and into desperation, but he finds windows into his past to explore on a trip of self-discovery. 

GENRE: Young adult dramedy; AUDIENCE: Young adult M/F 
 

STAR COMPS: Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges; DIRECTOR COMPS: Paweł Pawlikowski, Wes Anderson
 

PRIMARY SETTINGS: Italy, Pennsylvania (U.S.); SECONDARY SETTINGS: Croatia, Budapest, New York City, Paris

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STORY:

NICO is a handsome college senior who no one expects to actually graduate. He dates a sorority junior and off-campus plays guitar and screams in a grunge trio (yes it’s 1990). He wants to write better songs but he’ll need to open up his life to do that. Nico’s dad calls to find out when his son is graduating, triggering Nico’s severe OCD. Nico was mostly raised by his mom and her parents, Italian immigrants, in a small steel town outside Pittsburgh, but he hadn’t been in touch with his father for ten years. When Nico decides to do all he can to graduate, everything changes, putting off everyone around him. After an awkward graduation luncheon with his mom and dad, he is left to live at home with his mom and look for a job at a time and place where all the steel mills have closed and jobs are scarce. With his new college degree he at last secures a position at a local middle school, as a janitor. His first day off he fulfills the promise he made to his college sweetheart, taking the bus three hours to return to campus, only to find her in bed with someone else.

 

Nico continues to push a mop after school hours, when he meets a student who, taken with Nico’s looks, invites him to meet her mom, a former fashion photographer. That first session is rough, with Nico unable to get out of his own way in front of a camera. But he at last loosens up just enough to get a few decent shots and the student’s mom plants a seed of adventure in Nico to take his chances in the fashion capital of Milan, Italy, where she once worked. With nothing happening in his small corner of the world, and a bleak future, Nico overcomes both his fears and his rationality by buying a one-way flight overseas with dangerously few dollars and an Italian phrasebook in his pocket. 

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Milan. Nico soon learns that modeling is not as easy as he was led to believe as he repeatedly faces rejection less for his test photos as for his awkward deportment. When he runs out of lire, he leaves his humble pension alcove and is left to sleep shivering on a park bench. Desperate, Nico accepts an offer from an Italian woman, Arianna, to help him find his mother’s family roots in Italy, although he’s too proud to reveal his plight. Nico discovers a new world of timeless refined culture and generational identity. He gradually loosens up, and admits his feelings in a new song inspired by Arianna, but they are unrequited. Nico receives a call from his father with another redirect: a request for his son to find his paternal family roots in Yugoslavia, with no leads except the name of a village.

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Nico’s adventure alone in a rickety rental car with no heat on the remote dirt roads and hard switchbacks of a nation on the brink of brutal civil war brings him to more shivering and desperation in a land so bucolic he’s left holding a useless map. Stuck in a ditch under uncountable stars in unsettling silence save for a rushing river, undammed, it can’t end this way. With one final heave Nico sets his wheels free and finally finds the village of his father’s forebears, waking up the locals who speak only Croatian and carry rifles, and who lead him on a night-long quest to find his family. At dawn Nico is introduced to his great aunt, and just in time, for on that day there is a funeral procession. Nico walks for a mile to the top of a hill to inter his great aunt’s mother, who passed just before Nico blew in. 

 

Strangely and mystically reunited with his father without actually spending time with him, Nico finds a missing part of his identity, and he returns to Milan with incredible experiences to inspire him to finish his new song. Nico receives a call from the U.S. to let him know his cherished Italian grandmother who helped raise him is in the hospital. He  leaves Milan to return to his hometown before his grandma passes, booking a last-minute flight connecting through New York, with the only available seat next to a young cover model whose career is taking off. Nico shares his wild adventures with her as she takes his hand and rests her head on his shoulder on the night flight over the Atlantic.

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