Based on the real-life story of Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), a poet and journalist who spent most of his life in an iron lung after contracting polio as a child, Ben Lewin's The Sessions focuses on the period of O'Brien's life where, at the age of 38, he decided to seek the help of Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt), a professional sex surrogate, in order to lose his virginity. In the process, O'Brien develops a friendship with Greene that is all too easily blurred by their professional involvement, and is forced to confront his own attitudes towards sex, and how they were in turn shaped by his past, his parents, his Catholic faith, and the accompanying guilt arising from all of the above.