This is a story about love. Not Hollywood-style "fall head over heels and live happily ever after" type love. Real love and what truly happens from the time that two people meet for the first time to the point when they realize they are really in love with one another. Despite appearances, Paper Heart is not a documentary. It's more of a "mockumentary" featuring comedians Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera on a faux journey into falling in love and the real life people they meet in various stages of love and relationships along the way. Although there are a few comedic elements (most of which are seen in the trailer), it really is just a glimpse into two regular people starting a relationship, which, without all the glitz and glamour of a Hollywood-style romance, is surprisingly rather boring and dull.

The film begins with Charlyne on the street in Las Vegas asking the simple question, "Is anybody out there in love?" It's amazing how many couples pass by uninterested in answering her question. Love is a tricky thing. It seems as though many of the couples passing by are probably unsure themselves of their love for one another, so better to just walk around and avoid the subject rather than risk talking about it and discover the truth about whether it does or does not exist. Charlyne does not believe in love and is sure that she will never in her life fall in love with anyone.

To investigate the concept of love further, Charlyne sets out, armed with a production team, on her own quest to find out if love exists and how to really know if you love someone. She travels across the country interviewing real life couples and finding out what their experience was when they fell in love. Her interviewees range from people who have been together more than fifty years to people who have just met. Some are married, some divorced, some are even single. Everyone she interviews has differing ideas on what love is and how to know when you're falling in love.

Some believe love is a feeling you get when you care about someone. Some believe love is seen in actions such as someone making sacrifices in their own lives for the happiness of another. Some believe true love happens only once in a lifetime and when you find it you need to grab on to it no matter what. Some believe that when you truly do love someone, you can't exactly describe how it feels, you just know you're in love.

Throughout the interview and traveling process Charlyne not only learns about what others believe about love, but also experiences how it feels to begin a new relationship herself when Michael shows up and begins to take an interest in her. As she is discovering others' perceptions of love, she starts to form her own opinions on what is supposedly the beginning of a budding new romantic relationship that may cure her of her disbelief in the existence of love.

There is a problem with basing our beliefs about love entirely on other people's experiences, though. Everyone has a different interpretation. Everyone experiences things differently and uniquely from one another, and what one person feels in a given situation is usually completely different from what someone else would feel during the exact same course of events. One cannot definitively say what love is, means, and feels like for everyone because the impression is based solely on one's own experience, which is completely unique to that individual. All too often all of these differing views and opinions and experiences are what lead us to come to the conclusion that no one can really ever know for sure what love is because it's so different for everybody.

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