The true story of a 1920s Canadian jazz band who play their every performance gagged and almost completely immobilized by thick cords which bind them hand and foot. The music they produce - from a full range of instruments, yet without recourse to the usual limbs and orifices - is a moving triumph of courage over self-imposed adversity.
At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.