Infamous begins in 1958 with Capote (Jones) listening to a New York nightclub chanteuse (a cameo by Gwyneth Paltrow). We spend time with the author and his "Swans'" - the ladies he lunched with, gossiped with - and gossiped about. This would be Vogue editor Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), Marella Angelli (Isabella Rossellini) and the socialite Lady Slim Keith (Hope Davis). Peter Bogdanovich even drops by as Capote's editor, Bennett Cerf.

Then he happens upon a news story about the murder of a Kansas farm family - a story that could potentially be spun into a heartbreaking story of a rural paradise shattered by violence - in a New York newspaper. He treks to western Kansas to investigate the grisly murder of the farm clan, but his arrival is like the circus coming to town

The film then moves into its second act with Capote worming his way into the murderer's confidence. Though Hickock is happy to talk, The author is more interested in the testimony of the sulking Perry Smith (played here by the new James Bond, Daniel Craig). His courtship of killer Smith plays out bold and erotic and which transform Infamous into, of all things, a doomed romance. Capote hopes Hickock and Smith will exhaust their appeals and be hanged, so he can finish his book.