On Coney Island, in the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, a disillusioned do-gooder named Kate meets Jaap Hooft, a charismatic European film-maker who sees in the devastation wrought by the storm an opportunity to make a work of art about another disaster that struck Coney Island some hundred years before: the 1911 fire that started in the amusement park known as Dreamland, burning it to ashes from which it never arose. As Kate throws herself into the vortex of Jaap’s visionary schemes, she finds beauty, pain and betrayal, and eventually herself.