 In Weimar Germany, Lulu is an entrancing and beautiful free-spirited girl who lives on the beneficences of the men who fall under her powerful yet somehow innocent spell. Her current paramour is the highly-respectable Dr. Schön, but even his handsome son Alwa cannot resist the draw which Lulu exerts. Dr. Schön comes to believe he must marry Lulu, even though he has been engaged to a proper young woman of his own class, when his affair with Lulu becomes public. At their marriage celebration, Schön becomes jealously enraged by her behavior, and tragedy ensues. Although Lulu appears to escape the fate that this tragedy would suggest, her unwitting power over men leads her, and several of the men, in a seemingly inescapable spiral downwards toward destitution and further tragedy.