Dramatization of Russian ballet star Vaclav Nijinsky's diaries which detail his madness as well as his homosexual relationship with Ballet Russe impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his marriage to his Hungarian wife.

Director Robert Dornhelm casts Bud Cort for alter-ego purposes in She Dances Alone. Cort plays a documentary director, seeking to produce a film on the life of controversial ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky. He finds his goal of objectivity blocked by Nijinsky's elderly real-life daughter Kyra, who is as stocky as her father was sylph-like. Kyra's uncompromising insistence on total control over the project literally shapes (and frequently distorts) the film before our eyes. Adding to the Pirandellian atmosphere of the Australian-produced She Dances Alone is Max Von Sydow, also playing "himself."

The film suggests Nijinsky was driven into madness by both his consuming ambition and self-enforced heterosexuality, the latter prompted by his romantic involvement with Romola de Pulszky, a society girl who joins impresario Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes specifically to seduce Nijinsky. After a series of misunderstandings with Diaghilev, who is both his domineering mentor and possessive lover, Nijinsky succumbs to Romola's charms and marries her, after which his gradual decline from artistic moodiness to complete lunacy begins.