Biographer Martha Zamora describes Frida's rebellious schooldays, where she falls in with the boys and meets Diego Rivera, a superstar artist who will go on to change her life. But in 1925, a tragic accident thwarts Frida's ambition of becoming a doctor. Left facing a life of pain and injury, she channels this pain and uses it as the catalyst for her artistic career.
Frida and Diego travel to San Francisco, where he has an important mural commission. Frida's style stirs much excitement, and she is determined to succeed in her own right in the face of Diego's affairs. Shocked by the vast gap between rich and poor that she witnesses in Depression-era New York, she struggles to hide her disdain for high society. After losing a child to miscarriage and her mother to illness, she produces some of her most visceral and devastating works.
Dangerous politics and turbulent love shock Frida's world. After conducting a short affair with Leon Trotsky, Diego's political mentor, she finally achieves her own solo exhibition in Europe. But all does not go according to plan, and she returns to Mexico to find that Diego wants a divorce. Pouring her pain into her work, she creates one of her most famous masterpieces - The Two Fridas. After an assassination and an arrest, Diego and Frida are reunited in San Francisco. But her health problems increase, and she spends her last years in excruciating pain, continuing to paint all the while and creating some of her most enduring and heartbreaking images.