Ernest Hemingway built a public image of the hard-drinking adventurer even as his private letters and unpublished manuscripts told a more complicated story, and this portrait tries to close that gap using his own granddaughter as guide. Actress Mariel Hemingway narrates, tracing the writer from the Milan hospital where he fell for the nurse who inspired "A Farewell to Arms," through the battlefields of Europe he covered as a correspondent, to the Key West docks where he fished and wrote through the 1930s. It ends in Ketchum, the small Idaho resort town where he died by suicide in 1961. The film draws on rare home footage of Hemingway away from the public eye, passages read from his letters and unfinished works, and interviews with people who knew him personally, friends, family, colleagues, rather than relying only on biographers. The result stays close to the domestic and personal record: hospitals, marriages, fishing boats, war zones, and the house in Idaho, rather than literary analysis of the novels themselves.