Three very different people—a vulgar comedian, an eloquent Cambridge graduate with a chemistry doctorate, and a proud historian—deliver three speeches posthumously honoring the same chemist and lend comic but profound insight into the recipient's multi-faceted character and contributions.

As a man tosses out his old things during the pandemic, he thinks back to the lives he lived with them.

Al Roosten, a local business owner always second-best to his competitor, Larry Donfrey, contemplates returning to an anti-drug charity event to ensure that Donfrey is able to help his disabled daughter.

A man tells his life story leading up to his suicide, attempting to explain the seemingly-inescapable mental paradoxes he found himself facing in his quest to be an authentic person, which reinforced, time after time, his belief that he was a fraud.

Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.

In a futuristic society in which free speech is illegal without a license, a man works to get his license by having strange and touching conversations with a bizarre cast of characters.

Anxious ahead of an important lecture, a psychology professor blows up after finding a photo of his wife's ex-husband.

An Algerian university professor and former prisoner of France struggles with the symbolic implications of getting advice from an elite French visiting professor.

In Long Beach, California, a religious Chinese immigrant finds a job caring for a teenage boy suffering from leukemia. By watching M*A*S*H and reading the Bible, they find solace in one another during the last months of his life.

A professor tries to convey to his students the magnitude of the most perfectly crafted poem ever written in the English language: “Lycidas.”