Eight-year-old Mark Leonard lives on the brink of two worlds: one steeped in the hard­ship of post-World War II Amer­i­ca, where his father is con­sumed by finan­cial woes; the oth­er buoyed by his excep­tion­al­ly vivid imag­i­na­tion, in which Mark is an hero­ic sol­dier, a sur­geon and a dare­dev­il striv­ing to live up to the ideals of the 1950s.

When his fam­i­ly uproots from Queens, New York to start afresh in Mass­a­chu­setts, Mark finds refuge from lone­li­ness in an unlike­ly friend­ship with an eccen­tric and wealthy elder­ly neigh­bor who has shut out the world fol­low­ing a debil­i­tat­ing acci­dent. Their mutu­al gift for con­jur­ing up imag­i­nary worlds to cope with real­i­ty allows them to push the bound­aries between these two realms, togeth­er explor­ing the fine bor­ders between love, imag­i­na­tion, and the exis­tence of God.