After the appearance of YouTube but before the invention of smartphones, a disconsolate young writer hears, from an apartment window, a soft rock song from his youth. He decides identifying and owning the song will transform him into the confident man he needs to be in order to complete his manuscript on the relationship between Heian-era Japan and the 1967 Ice Bowl, but his frustrated search drives him to acts of desperation and, ultimately, madness. Starting in the mode of 1960s hysterical realism, Soft Rock becomes a meditation on delusion, mortality, and the enduring power of high-quality analog stereo systems.