We follow Smith through her teen years and creative evolution: Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as early influences, poetry collides with performance, leading to a rock and roll band and the recording of Horses.

Smith leaves public life to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith. On a canal in St Clair Shores, they build a home and start a family while each day she enters a room of her own at awn to write. When her reverie is shattered by a series of profound losses, Smith cares for her children in the aftermath; slowly, she begins to write again.