A wrong turn down a one-way street in the shadow of the Sunset Strip's Chateau Marmont leads Academy Award - nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner on a journey that nearly drowns him in the intoxicating, impulsive, tragic, maddening, and transformative nature of love. Despite the success of his latest film, Ron has been fighting depression and contemplating self-destruction.

"I don't want a mediocre, empty life." he tells Dr Yu, his psychiatrist-acupuncturist-herbalist, after half heartedly attempting to hang himself with a belt. Then, on a trip from his home in Upstate New York to Los Angeles, Ron meets and falls for enigmatic Johann, a Latin-quoting, leather-clad hustler with a vague European accent. Ron's year-long obsession with Johann is fucked by tequila, crack cocaine, crystal meth, and fantasies of rescue.

From scoring crystal on the dark streets of Los Angeles to plummeting out of a crack-induced high in the middle of a Hollywood film-exec meeting to feeding wild deer in Key West to falling in love with a world-weary prostitute, Ron unsparingly recalls the extraordinary, magical, hilarious, yet painful tale of what happens when a man loses himself utterly in reckless passion.