Andy Warhol grows up the youngest of three sons in a two-room house in a Pittsburgh immigrant neighborhood, and suffers three separate nervous breakdowns before the age of ten. Free art classes at the local museum start in fifth grade, and by sixteen he's enrolled at Pittsburgh's Institute of Technology studying painting and design. The film follows his move to New York, where commercial illustration work funds him until the early 1960s, when his first pop pieces turn him into a name. From there it traces the built-out persona: The Factory as a magnet for drag queens, socialites, and Hollywood visitors, his ventures into film and music, Interview Magazine, and his open life as a gay man years before gay liberation became a movement. His 1963 canvas Eight Elvises later sells privately for $100 million, a price bracket only a handful of artists have ever reached. The film treats his career as a straight line from a shanty in a Pittsburgh ghetto to the center of the New York art world.