F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in a Hollywood apartment on a Saturday afternoon in December 1940, working as a screenwriter and largely forgotten by the reading public that once made him famous. This documentary traces the arc that got him there: the meteoric success of This Side of Paradise, the marriage to Zelda that became both muse and wreckage, the Jazz Age glamour of Paris and the Riviera, and the writing of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night amid mounting debt and drinking. Archival photographs, letters, and manuscript pages carry much of the story, paired with narration and commentary from biographers and literary historians who track how a writer seen in his lifetime as a chronicler of excess ended up dying broke and underappreciated, only to be canonized after death as one of the essential American novelists. The film treats Fitzgerald's Hollywood years, hackwork on studio scripts, failed pitches, Zelda's institutionalization, as the bitter coda to a career that started with more promise than almost any of his contemporaries.