Greenwich Village, 1970s: Rainey Royal, fourteen years old, talented, and troubled, lives in a once-decadent, now decaying brownstone with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality. 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 create a substitute family. She's a rebel, even a criminal, but she's also deeply vulnerable, fighting to figure out how to put back the boundaries her life has knocked down, and more than that, struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world.