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Ella and Jack are a young hip couple in modern Dublin. Ella is a waitress in a fashionable café. Jack is a recently unemployed software engineer.
Stanley is one of Ella’s regular customers in the café. He frequently sits alone in front of the fish tank, writing his science fiction novels. His subject is the starfish in the tank. As Stanley writes his novel, we see it played out by the main character, Janet, in a black and white B-movie style.
As the relationship of Jack and Ella becomes strained, they begin to go in separate directions. She develops a vocation for religion, followed by a compulsion for shop lifting, while Jack retreats further into himself and his search for a career. Stanley isn’t having the best of times either. His novel doesn’t meet a warm reception at the publishers.
One night Ella decides to steal the starfish from the café fish tank. All three misfits head off to Cork, starfish in hand, with the goal of releasing them into a non-nuclear sea.
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