The to start with chapter, "Old Father, Old Artificer", refers to a line in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the next, "A Happy Death", invokes the Camus novel. Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch star as a pair of social outcasts having difficulties to make sense of the environment all-around them, in this sublime enjoy story based mostly on the function of underground artist Daniel Clowes.