Mitchell gathers an assortment of essays combining film criticism with personal narrative, covering topics such as his lifelong disabilities, personal relationships, and general existential crises. The films he covers are diverse, leaning mostly independent (with some mainstream classics). For the most part, the author follows the formula of describing a film, providing commentary and criticism, and contextualizing the film within some episode or theme from his life. The movies discussed include Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. The title essay is the least connected to Mitchell’s personal life and contains the most rigorous criticism. By contrast, the penultimate essay (one of the best in the collection), “Weightlessness,” contains no film criticism and only tangentially references Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity; it instead focuses on a deeply emotional chapter in the author’s life in which his young adult son was hospitalized. In another piece, Mitchell states, “This is not a story with an epiphany.” This line, though specifically written in regard to his father, serves as something of a thesis for the entire collection; Mitchell writes openly about his physical, relational, and religious anxieties, which, rather than trying to solve, he learns to accept. In his essay about Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, the author writes, “I come to trust my darkness, but the trust makes it no less dark. I grow comfortable with the way I move without light.” The provocative ways in which the author relates his personal life to the films he discusses makes the collection uniquely engaging—although many of the selections are not mainstream in the least, Mitchell’s takes are so edifying that readers will be hooked, whether or not they are familiar with the material.