The film begins on November 28, 1981, on Catalina Island, California, where 43-year-old Natalie Wood (Justine Waddell) falls off her yacht, Splendour, and drowns.

Flashing back to 1943, five-year-old, then named Natasha (Grace Fulton), grows up in a violent household in Santa Rosa, California.

Her performance impresses the director, Irving Pichel (John Noble), and a year later she reluctantly moves to Hollywood to start her career.

Three years later, teenage Natalie (Elizabeth Rice) is unable to prevent her neglected older sister, Olga (Leanne Simic), from leaving home.

While in high school, 15-year-old Natalie falls in love with classmate Jimmy Williams (Jason Smith), and starts to rebel against her mother.

By the mid-1950s, she (Waddell) and her friend Margaret O'Brien (Sophie Mentis) decide that Natalie should play the female lead in Rebel Without a Cause opposite James Dean (Nick Carpenter).

While filming West Side Story, Robert announces that he wants a divorce because he never sees Natalie anymore; he is also jealous of her rise to stardom.

[1] Slate magazine called the film a "standard" production, and criticized Bogdanovich for using real-life interview footage in the film: "Bogdanovich layers in archival material like newspaper headlines and stills of the real Wood, as well as talking-head interviews with her surviving relatives and friends, a choice that brings little to the proceedings, since whatever stories the witnesses tell are subsequently presented in painfully literal tableaux."

Its reviewer praised the cast, though, for its performances: "Justine Waddell is competent and appealing; she's no Judy Davis, but she avoids the biopic trap of overly mannered impersonation.

Indistinguishable Ken dolls Michael Weatherly and Matthew Settle offer uncanny vocal impressions of Robert Wagner and Warren Beatty, while Alice Krige (Star Trek's Borg Queen) is perfect as Maria, Natalie's monstrous, self-mythologizing Russian mother, who pulls the wings off butterflies to get little Nat to cry on cue.