Bright Star

London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23-year-old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of high fashion. This unlikely pair begin at odds, he thinking her a stylish minx, while she sits wholly unimpressed, not only by his poetry but by literature in general. When Fanny hears of Keats nursing his seriously ill younger brother, her efforts to help touches Keats; so, when she asks him to teach her about poetry, he agrees. The poetry soon becomes a romantic remedy that works not only to sort their differences but to fuel an impassioned love affair. When Fanny's alarmed mother and Keats' best friend finally awaken to their attachment, the relationship already has an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers are swept deeply into powerful new sensations. "I have the feeling as if we're dissolving," Keats writes to her. Together they ride a wave of romantic obsession that only deepened as their troubles mount. When Keats falls ill a year later, the two young lovers face not marriage but separation, in Keats' own poignant words, "forever panting and forever young."