What State and Main has, and what makes it distinctly Mamet, is brilliant dialogue. Mamet's writing is an illustration of how the best dialogue in movies often doesn't mirror the way people really talk. A Hollywood film crew descends upon a quaint New England town hoping to make their movie, only to find various complications disrupting and impeding their shoot. Unfortunately, and despite what the brochures say, the town hasn't had an old mill since it and other structures mysteriously burned down in the 1960s. Unfazed and ever resourceful, the director simply tells the novice screenwriter to write the old mill out the movie.
Complications begin to amass when the cast begins arriving in town.
Born in poverty but surrounded by natural beauty in 1943 Cuba, a young boy, Reinaldo, finds himself without a father, but with a natural talent for writing. Arenas soon joins revolutionaries in overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Batista. While he then enjoys the spoils of the new government's educational programs in the early 1960s, Reinaldo also begins exploring his homosexuality through a range of lovers. Yet, after securing a prestigious job at the National Library and writing his first novel, Reinaldo soon finds the same government he helped push into power suddenly beginning a crackdown on both artists and homosexuals. Despite being persecuted, eventually imprisoned and interrogated, the young man keeps writing, much to the chagrin of the government.