Richard is an average, middle-class American. He has done everything that was expected of him. He got a good education, built a successful career, bought a comfortable home in the suburbs, married a beautiful wife (Mary), and they are raising two children (Kate and Caleb). He worked hard. He paid his taxes. He was living the American Dream, and based on every metric he was taught to judge his own success, he should have been happy.
Instead, Richard is miserable. Both his career and his marriage are hanging by a thread. After suffering a meltdown at work, his boss orders him to take a vacation. To avoid the stresses of modern air travel and of heavy interstate traffic, Richard makes a questionable choice to travel cross-country with his family to a resort in California by way of the back roads – and promptly gets lost.
At a remote gas station late at night, the family encounters a young hitchhiker bound for Arizona who calls himself Socks. He is dirty, poor, and homeless. He walks the rough terrain barefoot and carries everything he owns on his back. He immediately draws Caleb’s curiosity and Richard’s contempt. A simple misunderstanding rapidly escalates, and Richard violently attacks Socks. Mary, appalled at her husband’s behavior, insists that Socks be allowed to accompany the family westward as penance.
This uneasy arrangement forces two men into close quarters with radically opposing worldviews, values, and beliefs. Richard believes in hard work, material success, responsibility, and providing for his family. He sees Socks as a freeloader, unwilling to contribute to society but willing to take handouts at the expense of taxpayers. Socks enjoys extraordinary freedom in his transient lifestyle, and he is unwilling to compromise that freedom for comfort or security. He sees Richard as a prisoner of a system that exploits his labor, weighed down by his possessions, obligations, and other people’s definition of success. Along the journey, the two men repeatedly butt heads, and Richard senses that he is spiraling further and further away from his family. Perceiving Socks’ presence as an existential threat to the life he’d worked so hard to build, Richard cuts him loose after a particularly nasty argument.
Shortly thereafter, the family becomes stranded in the middle of an unforgiving desert. They take refuge in an abandoned building. Socks unexpectedly catches back up with them just in time to defend them against a violent squatter. He shares his limited supplies and helps them to survive until help arrives, revealing Socks’ humanity in a way that Richard couldn’t see before.
With newfound respect for one another, Richard and Socks share the painful histories that shaped them. With Mary’s support, Richard reluctantly agrees to quit his toxic job and sell their home, affording the family some time to decide what they actually want from life. They deliver Socks to his destination in Arizona and part ways, not merely as friends, but as family.
