Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis offer a tour-de-force lesson in the seductive strength of art and the destructive power of genius. DiCaprio plays Arthur Rimbaud, a remarkable but rebellious teenage poet in 19th Century France whose philosophy of living life to the extreme inspired Jim Morrison and the rock generation. Thewlis is Paul Verlaine, a writer of lesser talent who is torn between his growing infatuation with Rimbaud and the domestic demands of his patient wife (Romane Bohringer). Together, these two men feed each other's insatiable hunger for life and love, trying desperately to straddle the lines between knowledge and self-destruction, creativity and delusion.