Rome, 1974. Guido is a wannabe avant-garde artist who feels trapped by his conventional and intrusive middle-class family. Serena, his wife, is no art lover, but she adores her artist and can’t resist interfering in his life. Their young sons, Dario and Paolo, are the unwilling witnesses of their parents’ passion, their fights and reconciliations, their infidelities and constant bargaining for affection. Taking in artistic ‘happenings’, flights of fancy, super 8 movies, lazy summer vacations, and secret confessions, the film recounts the happy years – which seemed so unhappy at the time – of a family that, in trying to be free, finds itself caught in a prison of its own making.