Max, just out of prison, plans to open a car wash in Pittsburgh. Lionel, back from five years at sea, wants to visit the child he's never seen. Meeting on the road, the 2 forge a touching friendship tempered through hard times.

The complex story of Melinda, a woman whose life is told from both a tragic and a comic perspective. Both stories involve the same woman who crashes a Manhattan dinner party, but with wildly different results.

Charismatic but dumb John McCabe arrives in a turn-of-the-century Pacific Northwest town to set up a whorehouse/tavern. Shrewd Mrs. Miller, a professional madam, arrives soon after construction begins. She offers to help McCabe run his business and the whorehouse thrives. McCabe and Mrs. Miller draw closer, despite their conflicting intelligences and philosophies. Soon, however, the mining deposits in the town attract the attention of a major corporation,...