At a Los Angeles coffee house called the Jabberjaw, a restless circle of Generation X performance artists vie for attention in a space that feels like a crossroads of ambition and danger. On one edge of the room, Maxwell, Shadoe Stevens speaks in precise, provocative cadences, declaring that > life is nothing but a homeless traveler on the RTD of art. On another turn, Young Man, performed by Will Ferrell, commands a quieter, wandering crowd with a wavering sincerity that mirrors the cafe’s shifting mood. Mayolia holds the room with stark monologues, often pausing to cradle a toy monkey as the audience leans in. And the notorious Stupid Girl, brought to life by Jennifer Coolidge, strips down on stage while dramatically tooting a cello, a moment that leaves some spectators unsettled and others entranced. Regulars circle back with a knowing mix of curiosity and irony, including Lou, the undercover cop played by Kin Shriner, always scanning for trouble amid the artful chaos.
Working behind the scenes is Walter, a busboy who dreams of being taken seriously by the cafe’s crowd, and his crush Carla, a poised Italian hostess played by Justine Bateman. Walter’s plan to win Carla’s heart is earnest but haplessly flawed: he tries to sculpt her face in clay, only to reveal his limited talent. A sharper shock comes when he discovers his landlady’s cat Frankie caged behind the plaster of a wall—an accident that leads him to attempt a risky peel-away of plaster and results in a fatal moment that none of them could have anticipated.
What follows is a grimly comic cascade of cover-ups. Walter conceives a macabre “thing I made” called Dead Cat to hide the accidental death, a piece that surprisingly wins over the regulars and even tempts a bold, dark opportunism from Mayolia, who slips Walter a necklace containing a bag of heroin. The gift triggers a fateful pursuit: Lou confronts Walter at his apartment, and the confrontation ends with Walter killing Lou with a frying pan and then sealing the evidence behind new plaster as a still more unsettling creation, which he calls Murdered Man. Leonard, the cafe’s resourceful observer, initially contemplates calling the police upon hearing about the Suicide-esque “Murdered Man,” but the allure of a big cash offer for Dead Cat convinces him to sweep the truth under the gallery floor.
At a party for Walter, Alice—played by Darcy DeMoss—admits she hadn’t realized Walter’s growing fame, and she agrees to pose for a nude sculpture. The moment is complicated by the tension between Walter’s longing and Carla’s evolving perception of him. When Alice later taunts Walter about his supposed virginity, he snaps and murders her as well, leaving Carla horrified and on the edge of flight. As Walter’s art world becomes a mix of admiration and fear, art critics begin to blur the lines between sculpture and the bodies that populate Walter’s life, a phenomenon that prompts the police investigation to grate against the cafe’s feverish energy.
The tension finally erupts in a brutal, self-destructive crescendo: as the chase closes in, Walter fabricates one more plastered tableau, a scene that culminates with his own body and the room smeared with plaster. The moment of revelation arrives when a police officer and Walter’s group of friends break into the apartment and unveil the true state of affairs—the corpses hidden behind the surface, the gallery turned confession. In a final, chilling act, Walter hangs himself in a self-punishing escape from capture, and the room collapses into a different kind of art, a ruin that has become rumor and legend. Maxwell attempts to imitate the suicide and dies in the process, while Carla, overwhelmed, is left mute by the horror of what she has seen.
In the aftermath, the theater of Walter’s life continues to ripple outward. The “Cuff and Link” duo—long-time skeptics of Walter’s work—finally strike a different chord, finding a path to success in their own right, and Mayolia pivots into a different kind of stardom as the host of a children’s television show. The Jabberjaw itself becomes a kind of furnace for both ambition and consequence, and Leonard, haunted by what he witnessed, burns down the cafe to secure insurance money, a final twist in a tale where art, desire, and danger have all bled into one relentless performance.
