Michele criticizes the film industry and its inhabitants, and is particularly embattled with a Neapolitan director making a musical about the 1968 student demonstrations. At the same time, Michele has a creative block and struggles to finish his film titled "Freud’s Mother." Nanni Moretti’s self-inquiry into filmmaking, political ennui, and men’s relations with their mothers.

Michele, Goffredo, Mirko and Vito are four friends who have participated in the battles of the student in Sixties. Now in the Seventies, the four friends don't know what to do, though young and with so many possibilities to find a job in life. Intellectuals marginalized and misunderstood, the four friends find themselves when they can in a restaurant to discuss their outlandish theories. A girl named Olga disrupts their life, but Michele is her favorite, although he does not know what to do with the girl.