Following the death of her drug-addicted mother, a whimsical young girl follows her chemically dependent father to a remote prairie house to discover a wondrous world of magical fireflies and nocturnal bog men in this hallucinatory childhood fantasy from visionary filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Noah (Jeff Bridges) is a burnt-out rock star whose post-superstar voyage to obscurity is hastened by a serious drug addiction that is also shared with his wild-eyed wife (Jennifer Tilly). When the Noah's increasingly erratic wife suffers a fatal overdose, the faded rock star opts to escape the painful reality by retreating to a ramshackle remote home with his young daughter, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland). Left to her own devices as her father stumbles about the grasslands in a drug-induced haze, Jeliza-Rose soon ventures into her own fantasy land before making the acquaintance of mentally challenged youth Dickens (Brendan Fletcher). As the two become fast friends and Jeliza-Rose joins the swimsuit-clad Dickens in defeating the menacing shark that traverses the nearby railways, the pair are watched over by Dickens' black-clad sister, Dell (Janet McTeer), who acts as Dickens' guardian and whose overly enthusiastic interest in the art of taxidermy borders on obsessive.