Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch's surreal road movie.

Cage's Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern's Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother).

Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for killing one of Marietta's thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives.

Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and THE WIZARD OF OZ, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery.