We open the scene at Raleigh, North Carolina's Central Prison, on November 29th, 1960. Paul Green stands vigil within a small crowd, demanding justice for a death row inmate. His daughter Janet arrives and offers him a newspaper: Richard Wright has passed away, aged 52. Green and Wright haven’t spoken in nearly 20 years, but the news of Wright’s death sends Green back to the final days of their friendship.

March 1941, the St. James Theatre in New York. Paul Green has just witnessed a dress rehearsal ending which sends him walking out of the theatre. Back in his hotel room, he receives a call from Wright, concerned about his abrupt departure. “I just wasn’t up to Welles tonight...”

On stage the next day, Orson Welles demonstrates to Canada Lee, the actor playing Bigger Thomas, how to properly smother an actress with a pillow. This is Anne Burr, playing Mary Dalton. She’s furious. The scene is halted as Burr stomps off. Green appears on the scene as the crew suggests a subterfuge to Welles’ direction.

As the crew sets up for a new scene, Wright and Green sit in the auditorium and a conversation starts on the ending of the play, over which Green walked out having seen the night before. Green sees he is contending with Welles and his producing partner, John Houseman. Now Wright admits he wrote the ending for the play, and in full knowledge that Green would protest, the content of a page of text changing the meaning of the play.

As the lights go down, presumably a part of the rehearsal, Wright begins to explain his position with an example from the night before: calling Green from the lobby of Green’s hotel. The lights go up with Richard onstage, acting out his ordeal from the night before opposite Ray Collins, an actor in Native Son, playing the hotel concierge.

This partially becomes a surreal construct of our film as a stock company of actors represents characters from Wright and Greens’ memories.

In this scene, we discover that Wright only called because he was not permitted to take the elevator to see Green, implicitly denied the right in order to preserve the sensibilities of lighter-skinned patrons.

Though Green expresses his outrage over Wright’s unequal treatment, Wright explains this is why his ending of the play must stand. The ending is his to tell. That may be, but Green has already assured his ending will be on the published version of the play and on every subsequent performance not controlled by Welles. This is this first impasse but both believe they can still make the other see their perspective.

What comes next is a passionate recreation of both their endings, Wright and Green standing in for the actors as they breeze through the critical moments. Wright prefers an ending where Bigger is left defeated, arms outstretched across the bars of his cell as if crucified, while Green insists Bigger must be given a choice, thus allowing him to become something greater than his circumstances. In his version, Bigger grabs a gun from a prison guard, but instead of killing again, hands the gun back. Wright maintains that Bigger never had a choice and that the audience must be challenged by Bigger’s brutality, not placated by his redemption (an ending Green prefers).

Another impasse reveals that Wright has been asked to write an article in the New York Times for their premiere. Wright has imagined it as a play between a White Man and a Black Man, essentially discussing the very same issues they are currently. Only now they are remembering their collaboration six months ago back in Chapel Hill. What begins as a reading of the “play” in a private room, translates to the stage, the men speaking more frankly and freely. Wright offers the story of meeting his estranged father, a sharecropper in Mississippi, as an example of the inescapable plight of poor black men, very much like Bigger, without hope.

Firmly back to reality, their argument comes to a head over Wright’s communistic leanings set against Green’s religious patriotism. They take a break from each other.

In the final half of the film, both Wright and Green seek out other confidants, and more intimate, telling stories are revealed. Green finally seeks out Wright to apologize, both of them preferring a peaceful ending to the day’s events and wanting to preserve their relationship. Green departs noting he will have the new pages to Wright in the morning. “No, Mr. Green. No more pages,” Wright says.

This refusal sets up the final argument where Wright is eventually forced to speak plainly to Green, telling him, “You don’t have the right,” and that his experiences do not allow him to see the error of his ending. Green returns home to North Carolina. He never sees Wright again.

Paul Green (David zum Brunnen)

Green, 47, was a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, well known and respected for his plays depicting black lives, especially in his native South. For these, he won great acclaim and numerous awards, including the 1927 Pulitzer for In Abraham's Bosom. Green started to question religion as a youth, he was an avowed patriot (at a time when the word was less fraught), a veteran of the Great War, and a progressive. He largely eschewed the New York limelight in the 1930s in favor of producing more expressionistic plays produced in North Carolina, and Native Son was meant to be somewhat of a triumphant return.

Richard Wright (J. Mardrice)

Wright, 32, was an incendiary figure who became an instant national celebrity on publication of his unsentimental and controversial, Native Son. Critically lauded, it sold over 250,000 copies in the first three weeks, and was the first book by a black author to be selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club (for which it was nonetheless censored). An avowed communist and atheist, Wright was a target of the newly formed House Un-American Activities Commission; his passport was revoked, his contacts and activities scrutinized, but his fame was just beginning.

Canada Lee/Bigger Thomas (Brandon Haynes)

Born Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata, Canada Lee adopted his name from the invention of a lazy boxing announcer, boxing being among the many professions he held before he turned to acting--others included jockey, restaurateur, and band leader. Welles had cast Canada Lee as Banquo for Voodoo MacBeth, a famous production of the Scottish play set on a Caribbean island and featuring an all-black cast. Welles called on him now to play the lead role of Bigger Thomas in Native Son.

Orson Welles (Charlie Cannon)

The play was directed on Broadway by 25-year-old Orson Welles. Welles, already an established champion of black theater, had been working with the New York Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project since 1935. He had just wrapped production on his own cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane, which would be released a few months later (Welles insisted on including the iconic sled "Rosebud" on the Native Son set). In 1941 he was at the height of his powers and self-regard, brilliant and dictatorial. He ran a 36-hour rehearsal, insisted that scene changes happen in complete blackness, and so overloaded the lighting grid that it crashed to the stage.

Anne Burr/Mary Dalton (Annie McElroy)

An ingenue stage actor, 20, tasked with portraying the confident Mary Dalton while standing up to Welles’ direction.

Nell Harrison/Mrs. Dalton (Josephine Hall)

A wisened authority of the stage, 42, with the ability to dole out advice when called for, playing the blind and kind Mrs. Dalton.

Ray Collins/Paul Max (Derrick Ivey)

A veteran of Welles and John Houseman’s Mercury Theatre, 51, awaiting his debut film performance in Citizen Kane as the ruthless crime boss, Gettys. Now portraying the communist lawyer, Paul Max.