[1] West German writer Philip Winter has missed his publisher's deadline for writing an article about the United States.

He meets a German woman, Lisa van Dam, and her young daughter, Alice, who are also trying to book a flight, and manages to get them all tickets on a plane to Amsterdam the next day.

When they go to the airport to meet Lisa's flight and find out she is not on the plane, Philip intends to leave Alice to wait for her mother with the authorities while he continues his journey home, but she is upset and locks herself in a bathroom stall.

After searching Wuppertal for two days using the Schwebebahn and a rented car, Alice realizes her grandmother does not actually live in the city.

According to Wenders, Alice in the Cities, his fourth feature-length film, came at a major turning point when he was deciding whether to remain a filmmaker.

He felt that his first two features were too heavily indebted to John Cassavetes and Alfred Hitchcock, while his third was an ill-advised adaptation of The Scarlet Letter.

[2] The scenario of a young girl and a writer thrown together was inspired by Wenders' long-time collaborator Peter Handke's experience as a single parent.

[3] The influence of Handke's 1972 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell, also featuring an alienated German-speaker travelling across the United States, can be inferred from the film's use of clips from John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, which is heavily referenced in the novel.

After a few hours of discussion, Wenders realized he could still proceed, albeit with some extensive rewrites to differentiate Alice in the Cities from Paper Moon, and he called his production office to tell them that the film was back on.

[2] Wenders and Robby Müller had hoped to shoot the film in 35 mm with the Arri BL, which had just come out at the time, but it was too difficult to find one (a common problem with newly issued cameras).

[2] One of Wenders' inspirations for the story of the film was Chuck Berry's classic song "Memphis, Tennessee", in which a man is trying to re-connect with his daughter.

[7] Nora Sayre and Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times wrote in 1974 that the film has "a great deal to say about Europe and America, about the exhaustion of dreams and the homogenization of nations, about roots and the awareness of time, about sterility and creativity, about vicarious and real adventure and, eventually, about the possibilities of the future".