When a mentally imbalanced prisoner gets out on parole, he tracks down the journalist who interviewed him while he was behind bars and persuades her to hire him as an assistant. But when she denies his advances, he aims for her adolescent daughter. The girl thinks she can stave off his disturbing desires -- at least for a while. But her naïveté is no match for his perversity.

In August of 1949, Life Magazine ran a banner headline that begged the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The film is a look back into the life of an extraordinary man, a man who has fittingly been called "an artist dedicated to concealment, a celebrity who nobody knew." As he struggled with self-doubt, engaging in a lonely tug-of-war between needing to express himself and wanting to shut the world out, Pollock began a downward spiral.