The story of Ace Eli Walford, a 1920s stunt flyer who barnstorms around the country, taking his eleven-year-old son Rodger with him as he goes from town to town. The place is rural Kansas, and the time is midsummer in the early nineteen-twenties, not long after World War I. Eli (Cliff Robertson), a barn storming pilot who has the emotional make-up of an 11-year-old, and Rodger (Eric Shea), his 11-year-old son who possesses the wisdom of the ancients, set off to see the world, which means flying all the way to San Willow. To Eli, San Willow seems to be as fabled as Xanadu and quite as remote. In essence, "Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies" is about the adventures of Rodger and Eli getting from nowhere to nowhere. Eli, a killer with the ladies at first, always leaves them unsatisfied. He seems to have a sex problem. Rodger spends a lot of his time getting his dad out of scrapes. He also drinks, smokes and goes to sleep at night crying for his deceased mom.

An urban cult of techno-pagans practice their religous rites in a virtual reality realm called Tragos until one of them uses the VR device as a suicide machine, only to reincarnate as a disembodied entity in cyberspace. Following the death of one of the tribe, the law soon intervenes and the prosecuting attorney, a Christian fundamentalist, scapegoats their leader and her group as a satanic suicide cult. The fundamentalist attorney pays a mole, an unemployed actor posing as a detective, to infiltrate the cult and bring its demise.