When social worker Damon Shorter, once an aspiring jazz musician, hears one of his clients singing snatches of songs unlike anything he's heard before, their beauty captivates him. Erina has spent her early adulthood see-sawing between psychiatric wards and the streets. She tells him she never writes anything down and never tries to make these phrases into a whole song because every moment of life should exist only for itself.

Damon starts getting visions of reviving his faltering song-writing career. But trying to impose some structure over Erina's on-again-off-again hold on reality brings him deeper into himself and his past failures than he wants to go.