It's 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents manage their run-down Catskills motel, The El Monaco Resort. The bank is about to foreclose, his father wants to burn down the place but hasn't paid the insurance, and Elliot is still figuring out how to come to his parents. When Elliot hears that a neighboring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much-needed business for the motel. Three weeks later, half a million people are on their way to his neighbor's farm in White Lake, New York, and Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life, and American culture, forever.