In 1951, Marcus, a working-class Jewish student from New Jersey, attends a small Ohio college, where he struggles with sexual repression and cultural disaffection, amid the ongoing Korean War.

The girlfriend of a couple vacationing in Baja is kidnapped by a drug dealer who demands that her boyfriend smuggle back cocaine into the US or she will be killed.

As her marriage dissolves, a Manhattan writer takes driving lessons from a Sikh instructor with marriage troubles of his own. In each other's company they find the courage to get back on the road and the strength to take the wheel.

Rick Harding is a former Marines officer, now working in the FBI as a chemical weapons designer. While packing up for the night, a group of armed soldiers led by wanted criminal Carlos Gruber, break into the FBI research lab.