A womanizing attorney is unable to have sex after a hypnotherapy session to quit smoking goes awry and he seeks help from one of his clients, an uptight psychiatrist, who teaches him that there is more to women than just sex.

In 1887, at age 23, reporter Nellie Bly, working for Joseph Pulitzer, feigns mental illness to go undercover in notorious Blackwell's Island a woman's insane asylum to expose corruption, abuse and murder.