Richard Dreyfuss delivers an Academy Award-winning performance as romance blooms between two complete opposites forced to share an apartment in New York. Elliot Garfield (Dreyfuss) has just arrived in Manhattan to take the acting role of his life--Richard III in an off-off-Broadway production. Ex-chorus girl Paula McFadden has just been dumped again. This time her ex has abandoned her, sublet their apartment--to Garfield--and left Paula and her nine-year-old daughter without a job or a place to live. Garfield legally has claim to the apartment, but he can't throw a mother and daughter out. So, despite Garfield's habits of chanting, burning incense and walking about naked, the threesome forms a home.