Despite his HIV-positive diagnosis in the early 1980s, Russian-born ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev continued to dance and work as the director of the Paris Opera, as chronicled in this documentary that focuses on Nureyev's final years. Through interviews with colleagues and friends and archival footage of his performances, the film touches on the dancer's early years, his success and his later years as he struggled to continue dancing.

The film suggests Nijinsky was driven into madness by both his consuming ambition and self-enforced heterosexuality, the latter prompted by his romantic involvement with Romola de Pulszky, a society girl who joins impresario Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes specifically to seduce Nijinsky. After a series of misunderstandings with Diaghilev, who is both his domineering mentor and possessive lover, Nijinsky succumbs to Romola's charms and marries her, after which his gradual decline from artistic moodiness to complete lunacy begins.