Bess, a lonely, trailer park teen, steals a car and makes a desperate journey from Kansas to Vegas in search of a father she never knew. Her trip takes her deep into the seedy underbelly of America where she encounters an array of lost-souls, deadbeats and con men, and learns that family can be found in the oddest of places.

Two young men who have been friends since early childhood decide to go on a trip to find a third friend who has long since disappeared. Stories they have heard indicate that the friend has been seen in an apparently rambling, incoherent state at Coney Island. Their trip leads them to a number of adventures involving the otherworld-like life at the Park and revelations related to their own pasts including the death of one's sister, a failed past relationship, financial failings, and alcoholism.

A forty-year marriage begins to unravel when the husband brings home a pet fish that he wants to keep in the bathtub.

"Meat Loaf" Aday is an overgrown Texas youngster, the son of a gentle woman dying of cancer and an alcoholic, abusive father. Tormented by his father and schoolmates over his size, he strikes out on his own after his mother's death, in an impossible task to prove himself to the world and to himself. A chance audition for a musical leads him to join forces with composer Jim Steinman, and together the two make music history with the operatic rock album "Bat Out of Hell." But the demons that drive Meat Loaf aren't assuaged by success, and eventually he must come to terms with them.