In 1920s New York, conservative East-Coast family man Max Perkins (Colin Firth) is the city’s most famous editor, counting Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald among his authors. He is about to meet logorrheic Southerner Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law), a hard-drinking philanderer and would-be novelist whose work has been rejected by every other publisher in town. The encounter will change both men’s lives for ever.