Sixty-year-old former movie star Howard Spence (
Sam Shepard) uses drugs, alcohol and young girls to avoid the painful truth that there are only supporting roles left for him to play. One day he realizes that nobody in the world would miss him if he died. He returns to Elko, Nevada, the place he ran away from years ago and where his 80-year-old mother still lives. She tells him that he may be a father.
Though shocked by the thought that he has a grown son somewhere, this brings a ray of hope to Howard’s otherwise narcissistic and meaningless life and he sets out to search for him. He soon finds out that not only is he the father of a son, but also of a daughter, the product of another short fling that happened at about the same time. These siblings do not know about each other. That’s when the real complications of this American family reunion begin...