Social worker Dan Cohen wanders into nursing homes with a bag of iPods, asking staff what music their residents used to love, then plays it for them. The film's opening scene shows the result: Henry, a man who has sat silent and slumped for years, comes alive the moment headphones go over his ears, naming the singer and singing along. Director Michael Rossato-Bennett follows Cohen's low-budget campaign to get personalized playlists into elder care facilities that mostly run on standardized medication schedules instead, and tracks the resistance he meets from an industry built around efficiency rather than individual history. Neurologist Oliver Sacks appears to explain why music reaches patients that speech no longer can, describing how melody seems to unlock memory circuits that dementia has otherwise shut down. The film moves between individual case studies and a broader argument about how American nursing homes are run, using each awakening on screen as evidence for a cheap intervention the system has largely ignored.