F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography, so this film builds his portrait out of what he did leave behind: letters to editors, publishers, lovers, and friends. Novelist Jay McInerney serves as guide, reading Fitzgerald's own words alongside an account of his career, from the Princeton years and a wartime posting in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, through the sudden fame of This Side of Paradise in 1920 and the writing of The Great Gatsby. The letters are blunt where the fiction is not: arrogant one moment, humble the next, addressed to the people who published him and the woman he married twice over in effect, since Fitzgerald kept reinventing himself for her the way Gatsby reinvents himself for Daisy. McInerney frames the correspondence as the more honest record, closer to Fitzgerald's actual voice than the novels' polished prose. The film also notes Gatsby's fifth film adaptation as evidence of how long the story has outlived its author, then returns to the letters to show the man who wrote it, drinking, broke, and still working, right up to the end.