Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, aunt and cousin to Jackie Kennedy Onassis, live together in a crumbling twenty-eight-room East Hampton mansion overrun by cats, raccoons, and waist-high weeds. Albert and David Maysles bring their cinéma vérité approach into the house itself, filming the two women as they cook on a hot plate, argue over old photographs, and perform old songs and dance routines for the camera in the same rooms where the wallpaper is peeling off the walls. Little Edie narrates her own history in fragments, replaying decisions about men and New York and her mother that she still seems to be arguing with herself about, while Big Edie needles her from a bed cluttered with papers and dishes. Health department notices posted on the property, glimpsed early in the film, gave the story its public start; what the Maysles found once they got inside is a mother and daughter locked together by devotion, resentment, and nowhere else to go. No narrator intervenes. The house and the two women are left to speak for themselves.