College professor David Zimmer succumbs to an extended, near-suicidal depression when his wife and sons die in a plane crash. While mindlessly channel-surfing one drunken evening, he stumbles across a clip from a silent comedy starring Hector Mann, a mysterious figure who disappeared in 1929. Intrigued - then ultimately obsessed - by Mann, Zimmer devotes himself to a rigorous examination of Mann`s 12 films and eventually publishes a critical study on them. When the book comes out, a stranger contacts Zimmer, informing him that Mann is very much alive and inviting him to the filmmaker`s private hideaway in New Mexico. What follows is a complex, constantly surprising story - a narrative of Zimmer`s cross-country journey and a series of revelations about the guilty secret that warped Mann`s life, changing him from an ambitious artist to a reclusive genius living in a self-contained world.