A famous French filmmaker (Jean-Luc Godard) is hired by a major Hollywood producer (László Szabó) to make a documentary on the state of post-Cold War Russia. The filmmaker, though, subverts the project by stubbornly remaining in France and casting himself as the title character of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, offering up a series of typically Godardian musings on art, politics, the nature of images and the future of cinema.