Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality, in a now-decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father's best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She's fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries her life has knocked down, and struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world.