Three middle-aged men disenchanted with their lives, try to relive their youth by moving into a house on a college campus and start hanging out with a group of misfit college students, losers, and retirees.

Theodore 'Theo' Decker was thirteen years old when his mother was killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tragedy changes the course of his life, sending him on a stirring odyssey of grief and guilt, reinvention and redemption, and even love. Through it all, he holds on to one tangible piece of hope from that terrible day, a painting of a tiny bird chained to its perch.