A family picnics in a park. As their toddler stalks a stranger’s dog, the boy’s mother daydreams about when her husband, Jeff, was young and dangerous. The addled present-day Jeff drones on about the charcuterie he selected for the outing. Gazing at his carefully greased pompadour, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, his wife manages to savor memories of a time when his drug use seemed cool. A$AP Rocky arrives with a store-bought salad.

A tired-looking grandmother, wearing vintage high-waisted jeans and Adidas x Raf Simons tennis shoes, pushes a laundry cart down the sidewalk, her silver hair blowing in a breeze that seems to exist only for her. She peers languorously into the laundromat, which is packed because it’s Sunday. She waits outside, lights an American Spirit, and nods at her building’s super as he passes by. The torrid affair she had with him in the summer of 1981 still lingers, like the hangover she’s been nursing all day. I need to stop going to those Fader launch parties, she thinks.

A glamorous young couple runs gleefully down the street, hand-in-hand, without a care in the world. They’re wild, free, and beautiful. They don’t remember where they’re going or what they’re running from. Maybe they should’ve read the show Bible for the corporate-sponsored Web series they’re shooting.

A swarm of teens, some brazenly brown-bagging Budweiser tallboys, gather around a skater trying futilely to grind a ledge. He simply can’t ollie high enough, and everybody knows it. A ‘68 Mustang pulls up, blaring a chillwave remix of a Lee Hazlewood-Nancy Sinatra duet. The driver, a tattooed man in his late thirties, gets out and takes his deck out of the trunk. “Let me show you how it’s done,” he says, before tearing his meniscus. The teens laugh and pour beer on him, but they soon realize that none of them can ollie high enough, either. They wallow in the tragedy that is man’s hubris.

An actor walks out of a pizzeria. He’s spotted by a former high-school classmate, who doesn’t watch the prestige drama that he recently had an arc on. “Felix?” she says. “Jesus, I didn’t recognize you.” “I go by ‘Ray’ now,” he says, looking around for anyone who might know him from TV and laugh with him, because obviously he goes by Ray now. “What? Why?” the classmate says. To which he replies, “It’s a stage name.” He looks into the distance and thinks about acting, fame, and life. “I mean, aren’t all names stage names, in a way?” he continues. But the old classmate has walked away. Or maybe she wasn’t there in the first place. Ray cries softly, and mourns Felix, who, after seeing the pilot of “Entourage,” died so that Ray could live.

The heat of the summer has come early, and an Independence Day parade proceeds in veritable slow motion. A bandleader gazes at the baton that she just tossed desultorily into the air. The sun hits it just so, and, for a moment, she’s entranced. She thinks of her boyfriend, who is recovering from a fireworks accident from the night before. He might never be able to play guitar again. She thinks about America, about how it’s an idea as much as a place. Maybe that could be a good hook for her college-application essay. She hopes that she can get into Oberlin, but it would be so far from her boyfriend, who plans to attend a secret tattoo college in L.A. For a second, she thinks the baton might hang in the air forever. But, alas, it falls sadly to the ground, right in front of A$AP Rocky. He inexplicably breaks it over his knee.

In a faux biker bar where a burlesque show is finishing up, a group of music-industry interns discuss an artist who has weathered countless cycles of hype and backlash. She’s come out on top, of course, because they’re still listening to her and arguing about her. The entire A$AP Mob walks in, including ancillary members. Sean Lennon is also with them. “I love burlesque,” he says. “Of course Sean Lennon loves burlesque,” one of the interns says under his breath. “Hey, lay off,” the Weeknd says, appearing from behind a mound of fake cocaine. “He’s been through a lot.” “Haven’t we all, though?” one of the burlesque performers says ponderously, before she throws on a nine-hundred-dollar Perfecto jacket, hops on her Triumph, and crashes into a recently installed row of Citi Bikes.