The film stars an ensemble cast which includes James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Bobby Cannavale, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Aida Turturro, Christopher Walken, Barbara Sukowa, Elaine Stritch, Eddie Izzard, and Amy Sedaris.

In early 1980s New York, seamstress Kitty Kane learns that her construction worker husband, Nick Murder, has been having an affair after finding a sexually explicit poem he wrote to his mistress.

The revelation generates a rift between Kitty and Nick and sends shockwaves both through their family and closely knit suburban neighborhood; as characters contemplate what love, sex, and physical pleasure mean to them, their thoughts are conveyed via elaborate musical numbers representing their deepest fears, anxieties, and fantasies.

Against the backdrop of her parents' deteriorating relationship, their daughter Baby- who plays lead guitar and provides vocals for a local rock band- finds herself embarking on her own romance with Chetty Jr., an attractive but dimwitted neighborhood boy who insists on referring to himself in the third person as "Fryburg."

Wanting to confront Tula but unsure of her identity, she enlists the help of her cousin Bo, a rockabilly fixated, paranoid man who insists that he got away with the murder of his adulterous wife, Delilah, who is in fact still alive and living with her boyfriend.

Nick's mother tells him that he's following in the footsteps of his similarly unfaithful and repulsive father and grandfather, both of whom engaged in sexually questionable behavior and who are now remembered as nothing more than "whoremongers."

The website's critic's consensus reads: "This movie musical aims for fun and modern, but Romance and Cigarettes is too scattered and uneven to achieve either.