In Summer 1961, at a party held on the Cliveden estate of Lord Astor, Minister for War John Profumo met, and subsequently had a brief affair with, a call-girl by the name of Christine Keeler, who had also been seeing a Soviet diplomat.
At an elite, old-fashioned boarding school in New England, a passionate English teacher inspires his students to rebel against convention and seize the potential of every day, courting the disdain of the stern headmaster.
A young woman arrives in the city searching for her mother, whom she finds working in a nightclub, unaware that she is known to everyone there as the 'dreamer' because she is an alcoholic woman who spends her time soliciting customers and earning commissions from their drink purchases.