Mae Busch and Charley Chase are in love. However, her father does not approve. A Baron sees Mae and concocts a fake kidnapping in order to get her attention. In other words, he pays two guys to pretend to try to abduct her and the Baron waltzes in like a hero and saves her. Well, the scheme seems to work as her family think the Baron is great and invite him to the house. But Charley and the two accomplices have other ideas...
A very young Charley Chase is a starving artist. He does not have much luck stealing fruit from a food vendor's cart. He cannot escape from his landlady, who wants the overdue rent. When a pretty girl shows up, Charley and his downstairs neighbor, who is a weightlifter, compete for her affections.
A painter turned tramp (Chaplin), devastated by losing the woman he was courting as a wealthy man, finds himself drunk and getting drunker by the minute with some sailors at a bar until he's literally falling down. He keeps futilely trying to draw the woman's picture on the floor with a piece of chalk until he finally passes out cold (or perhaps dies, as in the poem) at the end of the film.
Two rivals for Mabel's hand play a series of dirty tricks on each other. Finally, one of them gets Mabel alone and is about to marry her, but his rival comes up with a strange scheme to stop them. Soon the Keystone Kops arrive on the scene, and chaos quickly ensues.