Three friends get together and bury a box making a pact to open it at midnight at their high school graduation. In the little town in Georgia that they live in, things soon change. One is little miss perfect, one is an engaged prom queen, and the other is a pregnant outcast. The night of graduation, they open the box and they strike up a conversation. All of a sudden, one brings up the topic of her going to Los Angeles for a record contract audition. They all decide to go together and they leave. With a little money, they set out on the road with a guy named Ben. When one of them tells the other a rumor that he might be a homicidal maniac they are all scared of him. When they reach LA, Lucy falls in love with Ben and against her father's wishes, she stays and she goes to the audition.
Bob Hughes is the leader of a "family" of drug addicts consisting of his wife, Dianne, and another couple who feed their habit by robbing drug stores as they travel across the country.
Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.
A still closeted young woman brings her girlfriend home for Thanksgiving, only to have her coming out efforts thwarted by the unexpected arrival of her male roommate.
Lillian is a 21-year-old drifter engaged to a philandering loser and locked in her room with a strange man. She lives next to a failed violinist who won't stop playing his instrument. He lives next to a New Age fanatic who's into colonic treatments; she lives next to two drug addicts who mess with the wrong prostitutes and end up answering to a pimp named Mr. Tangerine. In a barrage of head-spinning vignettes, we are sucked into a surreal motel fantasy-land where society's riffraff dwell in that awkward place between freedom and desperation.
A lonely waitress with a tragic past, Agnes rooms in a run-down motel, living in fear of her abusive, recently paroled ex-husband. But when Agnes begins a tentative romance with Peter, an eccentric, nervous drifter, she starts to feel hopeful again - until the first bugs arrive...