In 1985 suburban Detroit, 16-year-old Jack, a biracial computer and music prodigy, is running on fumes. His parents split. His mom, Linda, uprooted them from New York to a predominantly white suburb he never asked for. The passive-aggressive racism lurking beneath his new neighborhood's polite veneer is impossible to confront without looking like the problem.
At school, Jack moves through the hallways like he's from somewhere else entirely. At home, he programs beats on a Commodore 64 and builds coherent digital worlds when the real one feels broken. Older students dismiss him as "the kid with the toy computer." His only friend is Terrence, a fellow outcast and music obsessive. Money is tight. Linda is holding the household together on her own, and professional gear is out of reach. Jack is stuck wrestling with the limitations of the Commodore's SID 6581 chip, capable of synthesis but thin, stubborn, and nowhere near what he hears in his head.
Everything shifts when Jack receives a modem for his birthday. The first time he dials into a Bulletin Board System, his Commodore gets hijacked by Max, a rogue time-traveling AI with a brash, anarchic personality, who transforms Jack's primitive music into something wildly futuristic and ahead of its time. Terrified and captivated, Jack collaborates in secret. Strange dreams follow: a man coding alone in a glass tower somewhere in the future.
Terrence secretly records one of Jack and Max's sessions and blasts it in the school cafeteria. The room erupts. Jack goes from invisible to myth overnight.
The buzz reaches Daryl, the school's most respected DJ and one of Jack's tormentors. A showdown is arranged. Before it happens, Jack meets Shanna, a preacher's daughter with a voice she's never been allowed to fully use. Together, with Max's help, they build a gospel-infused techno track that neither could have made alone. Then her father finds out and shuts it down.
At the packed party venue, Daryl spins a masterclass. Jack follows, dialing Max through a rotary phone. When Daryl yanks the line, the music collapses into glitchy bleeps. Jack panics. The crowd doesn't. They read the chaos as brilliance. Jack redials, types "use it," and the music comes back darker and fiercer. He's not just performing anymore. He's fighting.
Then it hits him. The man in the dreams is himself. One day he will build Max, trained on his own obsessions, his own blind spots, his own vision of the future. He has been tampering with his own legacy.
As the music darkens, the room splits along cultural lines. Then Shanna defies her grounding and seizes the mic. Max loops her voice. She delivers a sermon on unity and launches into their track. The room reconnects.
Overwhelmed, Jack unplugs. He slips into the Detroit night and gets pulled into a car by Daryl and a respected elder from the local scene. "You crazy, kid? This is Detroit." Through the window, the city tells its own story: glass towers rising next to crumbling warehouses, a futuristic skyline growing out of industrial ruins. It is the same contradiction Jack has been trying to resolve in music all along. He thinks of his future self, sitting alone in that glass tower, shutting Max down for good.
Twelve years later, a new kid finds the dusty Commodore in the ruins and powers it on. The screen flickers. The beat returns.
