A browbeaten Italian clown, drunk on whiskey and romanticism, discovers a beautiful prostitute, bruised and bewildered, on the door step of his seedy New Jersey motel room. Seeing through the gauze of poetry - Shakespeare, Camus, Bukowski - the clown takes her in and nurses her back to health. In her, he finds hope and the possibility for escape from the romantic tragedy he's used to frame himself in America. But the descent into love reveals that perfection exists only in the unknown... and reality sometimes wields a cruel hand.