The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apartment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry's that ignite her suspicions of infidelity. He now has to reckon with the consequences of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures.