The film is set in an anonymous office in Brooklyn, New York. A handful of amateur and professional actors have been invited to an audition. A young American casting director is apparently looking for an actor to play Friedrich Engels holding the funeral oration for his friend and comrade in arms Karl Marx.
The six actors invited to the audition provide a short overview of their biographies, enumerating their professional success or lack of it and trying to present themselves as appropriate candidates for the role while under fire by the increasingly captious questions emitted by the casting director. They turn to the camera to modulate their voices; strive heroically to merge with the aged Engels, revealing the deeper recesses of their own souls in the process.
In ’Some Engels’ Johne depicts the unsettling depletion of want, the ever unfulfilled hope of a new shining future.