David is a young American actor. He is very famous because he plays a macho firefighter in a tv series.
Despite his growing popularity, the small screen feels tight to him: he dreams of a role in the movies, like his friend and rival Steve, whose determination, however, David seems to be lacking.
David is very superficial, doesn’t try remotely hard enough, to the point that he often doesn’t even read the scripts, and has Mildred, his agent, do it for him. So, when the opportunity comes, it finds him unprepared. Convinced he is to play in a biopic about Giacomo Casanova, he arrives in Italy and finds himself in Recanati, on the set of “Giacomo in Love,” a very intimate art film about the emotional turmoil and passions of Giacomo Leopardi.
A poet of who’s existence David didn’t know anything about, and who is culturally, historically, physically distant from him. To save the film (and the coronaries of the director, who has staked his entire career on the project) production hires a consultant: Silvia a great historian and connoisseur of Leopardi’s life and owner of the Dead Poetry Cafè, where poetry is still being made.
There is nothing more distant and incompatible than this duo! David, such a Yankee, materialistic and superficial; Silvia, passionate, cultured and sensitive. But you know what they say… opposites attract.
Silvia brings David into Leopardi’s world, brings him closer tohis sorrows, his view of the world, and David begins to understand, to interpenetrate the poet, to make the character his own. At the same time, David and Silvia, start to get accustomed to each other, slowly finding in the other person the answers that could fill the void that is hidden in their souls.
Without realizing it’s happening, they find themselves in love, only to be confronted with the idea that something’s got to give: either one’s pride, or the other’s home. David and Silvia’s love story unfolds along the making of a film, which uses the light tone of romantic comedy to tackle the themes related to the great Leopardi’s poetry, binding the two protagonists to each other.
But most of all it pushes the characters to change for the better.