London, 1937: Leonora Carrington is a twenty-year-old on the cusp of independence, discovering her own creative powers as a painter, when she falls into a turbulent, passionate love affair with Max Ernst, a married artist twenty-six years older. Determined to break free from her family's upper-class expectations, she follows him to Paris, where she is thrust into the vibrant, revolutionary world of studios and cafes, where rising visionaries of the Surrealist movement, like Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali, are challenging conventional approaches to art and life. Inspired by their freedom, Leonora begins to experiment with her own work, translating vivid stories of her youth onto canvas and gaining recognition under her own name, until, suddenly, the shadow of war and occupation begins to spread over Europe, and headlines emerge denouncing Max and his circle as "degenerates."
