Set in New York City in 1985, Act One of Millennium Approaches introduces us to the central characters . As the play opens, Louis Ironson, a neurotic , gay Jew learns his lover, WASP Prior Walter, has AIDS . As the play and Prior's illness progress, Louis becomes unable to cope and moves out. Meanwhile, closeted homosexual Mormon and Republican law clerk Joe Pitt is offered a major promotion by his mentor , the McCarthyist lawyer Roy Cohn . Joe doesn't immediately take the job because he feels he has to check with his Valium -addicted, agoraphobic wife, Harper, who is unwilling to move. Roy is himself deeply closeted , and soon discovers that he has AIDS .

As the seven-hour play progresses, Prior is visited by ghosts and an angel who proclaim him to be a prophet ; Joe finds himself struggling to reconcile his religion with his sexuality ; Louis struggles with his guilt about leaving Prior and begins a relationship with Joe; Harper's mental health deteriorates as she realizes that Joe is gay; Joe's mother, Hannah, moves to New York to attempt to look after Harper and meets Prior after a failed attempt by Prior to confront Hannah's son; Harper begins to separate from Joe whom she has depended upon and finds strength she was unaware of; and Roy finds himself in the hospital, reduced to the companionship of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and his nurse, Belize, a former drag queen and Prior's best friend, who meanwhile has to deal with Louis's constant demands for updates on Prior's health. The subplot involving Cohn is the most political aspect of the play. Portrayed as a self-loathing, power-hungry hypocrite, he prides himself on his political connections and influence, which he has amassed through decades of corruption. In the play, he recollects with pride his role in having Ethel Rosenberg executed for espionage . As he lies alone in the hospital, dying of AIDS, the ghost of Rosenberg sings him a Yiddish lullaby and then brings him the news that the New York State Bar Association has just disbarred him, destroying his final hope of dying as a lawyer. The play ends on a note of optimism. After his friends procure for him a stash of AZT , in 1990 Prior is still alive and is managing to live with AIDS. With his friends, he looks at the statue of an angel in Bethesda Fountain and talks of the legend of the original fountain, and how it will flow again some day. The play is deliberately performed so that the moments requiring special effects often show their theatricality. Most of the actors play multiple characters ( eg, the actor playing Prior's nurse also appears as the Angel). There are heavy Biblical references and references to American society , as well as some fantastical scenes including voyages to Antarctica and Heaven , as well as key events happening in San Francisco and at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park .

Act I: 1959

Grieving parents Bev and Russ are planning to sell their home in the white middle-class Chicago neighborhood of Clybourne Park. They receive a visit from their local clergyman, as well as a neighbor and his deaf, pregnant wife; the neighbor informs them that the family buying the house is black, and pleads with the couple to back out of the deal, for fear that area property values will fall if black residents move in. It becomes apparent that the black family moving in are the Youngers, the protagonists of A Raisin in the Sun , and the neighbor, Karl, is Karl Lindner, the minor character from that play who attempts to bribe the Youngers into abandoning their plans to move into the neighborhood. As arguments ensue about the potential problems of integrating the neighborhood, both couples awkwardly call on Russ and Bev's black housekeeper and her husband to express their opposing views. Russ finally snaps and throws everyone out of the house, saying he no longer cares about his neighbors after their callousness and cruelty to his son Kenneth when he returned home from the Korean War . Kenneth later committed suicide on the upper floor of their home.
Act II: 2009

Set in the same home as Act I, the same actors reappear playing different characters. In the intervening fifty years, Clybourne Park has become an all-black neighborhood, which is now gentrifying . A white couple seeking to buy and replace the house are being forced to negotiate with local housing regulations with a black couple representing a neighborhood organization. The white couple's lawyer, the daughter of the neighbor and his deaf wife, mentions that her family moved out of the neighborhood around the time of her birth; the black wife is a relative of the family who bought the home from Bev and Russ. The discussion of housing codes soon degenerates into one of racial issues, revealing resentments from both parties. While this is happening, a workman finds an old trunk that Russ has buried in the back yard, with some of the things of their son, including his final letter.

In a short coda, we see Bev back in 1959, catching her son awake late at night (and probably writing his suicide note), she says, naively, "I really believe things are about to change for the better."

The film is a modern-day film noir in which the sardonic, ginsoaked detective contends with an odd cast of characters while tailing a mysterious, middle-aged man traveling with a Mexican boy from Chicago to Los Angeles. John Rosow is a Chicago gumshoe whose skill for cracking a case often comes with a price; he has a penchant for getting in over his head, but he never loses his cool. Contacted by influential lawyer Drexler Hewitt and asked to shadow a man who is currently en route to Los Angeles with a young boy, Rosow collects his cash and instructions from Hewitt’s gruff assistant Miss Charley, and sets out on his latest assignment. Upon arriving in Santa Monica, however, Rosow is caught off guard to learn that his objective has been updated. He is now to bring the man back to New York. For his efforts, Rosow will receive the tidy sum of a half-a-million dollars.

During the 1980s, a failed stand-up comedian is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City while becoming an infamous psychopathic crime figure.