The film tells the story of Bill, a young, successful stockbroker who zips off to Greenwich Village on his motorcycle when no one's looking to venture into the hippy counterculture world. His wife, Nancy, is the dream of every middle-class male. She is liberated enough to go around bra-less, enjoy sex, and be the perfect mother for their child. Nancy, however, is unaware of her husband's excursions and happily attends the local ecology awareness meetings without Bill. Bill soon becomes involved with Gordon, an Andy Warhol-type character whose protege, Roz, fascinates the square young businessman. After witnessing a wild party on Fire Island, Bill realizes that this crowd is not for him (shallow, lifeless) and that he does not even want to have sex with Roz because he is lonely for his wife. Nancy arrives unexpectedly on the island to reclaim her husband and together they walk off into the sunset hand in hand.
Photographed entirely in color, Four Stars was projected in its complete length of nearly 25 hours (allowing for projection overlap of the 35-minute reels) only once, at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in the basement of the now-demolished Wurlitzer Building at 125 West 41st Street in New York City. The imagery in the film is dense, wearying and beautiful, but ultimately hard to decipher, for, in contrast to his earlier, and more famous film Chelsea Girls, made in 1966, Warhol directed that two reels be screened simultaneously on top of each other on a single screen, rather than side-by-side.
