Set during the final hours of the controversial Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's life, the film interweaves scenes from his unfinished works with glimpses of his intellectual and artistic world in Rome. Willem Dafoe portrays Pasolini as he moves through conversations, creative visions, and the city's margins on the night before his brutal murder in 1975. Ferrara offers a meditative portrait rather than a conventional biopic, dwelling on Pasolini's sensibility and contradictions as much as on the events surrounding his death.