Youthful poet Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) drinks absinthe and neglects his devoted wife, Mathilde (Romane Bohringer). Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio), an even younger and more celebrated poet, enters their lives and alienates the couple even further, seducing Paul and haughtily mocking their bourgeois lifestyle even as he benefits from it. Mathilde stands by Paul after he is jailed for sodomy, but she cannot prevent the poets' self-destructive descent.