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Synecdoche, New York

Theater director Caden Cotard finds his life unraveling. He has mysterious physical ailments and has been growing increasingly alienated from his artist wife, Adele, who creates microscopic paintings. He hits bottom when their couple's therapy fails and Adele leaves him for a new life in Berlin, taking their four-year-old daughter, Olive.

After Caden's successful production of Death of a Salesman, he unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, giving him the means to pursue a new theatrical project on a gigantic scale. He decides to create a play of brutal realism and honesty that will span years and into which he can pour his whole self. Gathering an ensemble cast into an enormous warehouse in Manhattan's Theater District, he directs a celebration of the mundane, instructing the cast to live out their roles in real time. As the mockup stage inside the warehouse grows increasingly mimetic of the city outside, Caden continues to seek solutions to his personal crises. He is traumatized to discover that Adele has become a world-famous painter in Berlin and has given Olive a full-body tattoo.

After a failed attempt at a fling with his box-office employee, Hazel, Caden instead marries a leading actress in his cast, Claire, and has a daughter with her, though reality is blurred as he refers to Olive alone as his "real daughter". His and Claire's relationship fails, and he continues his awkward friendship with Hazel while still harboring feelings for her. Hazel lives in a house that is constantly on fire and filled with smoke. She marries and has her own children, eventually returning to work as Caden's assistant. Meanwhile, an unknown condition is gradually shutting down Caden's autonomic nervous system, so he has to walk with a cane.

As the decades pass, the continually expanding warehouse is isolated from the slow decline of the city outside. Caden buries himself ever deeper into his magnum opus, further muddying the line between reality and the world of the play by populating both the cast and crew with doppelgängers. For instance, he hires a man named Sammy to play the role of Caden himself after Sammy reveals that he has been obsessively following Caden for 20 years. (Eventually, a Sammy lookalike is cast as Sammy.) In one scene, Caden is mistaken for Ellen, the housekeeper of his absent first wife Adele's apartment, and he passively takes the role, regularly scrubbing objects in the model of her apartment. In other scenes whose reality is unclear, Caden meets with the adult Olive, who works as an erotic dancer; finally, she demands that he ask forgiveness for abandoning her as she lies on her deathbed as a result of her tattoo becoming infected. He also lives through his parents' deaths and begins a short-lived affair with Hazel's doppelgänger.

Sammy begins to romantically pursue Hazel, which sparks a revival of Caden's own relationship with her. This makes Sammy feel spurned. Mirroring an earlier moment where Caden nearly jumped off a building in anguish, Sammy jumps to his death off one of the warehouse's many buildings. Caden and Hazel finally begin a full romantic relationship, but Hazel soon dies of smoke inhalation in her constantly burning house.

As Caden becomes ever older and feebler, he continues to push against the limits of his relationships in his work and private lives. One day, the actress he hires to play Adele's housekeeper Ellen offers to take over his role as director so that he can fully commit to the role of Ellen, which relieves him of his many professional duties and stresses. She soon gives him an earpiece that she instructs him to leave in permanently. Through the earpiece, she directs his every move as he lives out his days cleaning Adele's apartment. The actress playing Caden inserts increasing amounts of her own self and personal reflections into Caden's role as Ellen. The world deteriorates into chaos until some unexplained calamity leaves the warehouse in ruins, with the corpses of his cast and crew strewn around the massive set. Eventually, an elderly Caden wakes in the abandoned set of Adele's apartment without any clear sense of where his play begins and his life ends. Following the stage directions from his earpiece, he wanders the ruins of the warehouse, finding within it another warehouse, and another within that, and so on. Finally, Caden prepares to die as he rests his head on the shoulder of an actress who had previously played Ellen's mother, seemingly the only other living person in the warehouse. As the scene fades to gray, Caden says he has a new idea for how to perform the play, but the director's voice in his ear cuts him off with his final cue: "Die".