One summer night in New York in 1953, a senator (Tony Curtis), a starlet (Theresa Russell) and her baseball-star husband (Michael Emil) end up in the hotel room of a physics professor (Gary Busey). They discuss sex, power, politics, physics, the atom bomb and their troubled childhoods. The characters are clearly based on Joseph McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein, and these icons are used to explore the history of postwar America, as well as its uncertain future.