‘You’re a genius with a dream, and I’m just a coloured girl out of a job,” complains Angel to her gay best friend, Guy, with whom she shares an apartment in a big old house that is no match for a Harlem heatwave. Angel is a showgirl who has lost her livelihood for bawling out her gangster boyfriend from the stage. Guy is a costumier who trundles away on his sewing-machine running up glamorous gowns for Josephine Baker in the certainty that the singer will one day send for him from Paris.
Across the landing lives godly Delia, who harbours a different sort of dream: of bringing birth control to a neighbourhood impoverished by the Great Depression, with the help of kindly Sam, a bachelor doctor worn out by delivering premature babies to exhausted women. Sam, meanwhile, dreams of Delia.
