On the outskirts of Austin, 10-year-old Annie tears around on her BMX bike, hurls dough at cars, and smashes things up with her baseball bat. Her father, a goat farmer-cum-demolition derby driver, does little parenting. Annie has no friends her age, so her daily routine is filled with solitary mischief. Playing in the woods one day, she hears a woman's plaintive call for help from an abandoned well. Though Annie feels driven to visit the well daily, she is unsure about how to deal with the woman's plight.

Monty is a bodybuilder. His gym is the very heart of his existence. He is aggressively male, outrageously narcissistic and a bigot. Sharing this strange world is Monty's cerebral and emotionally wounded younger brother, Bertin. One stormy day, the brothers' bizarre but settled lives are suddenly disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Lilith, a Catholic nun collecting contributions for an unusual cause. Lilith's arrival is the catalyst required to generate a momentous change in Bertin's relationship with his brother: a change that results in the astonishing and gruesome downfall of the vainglorious Monty.

The uncle of an executed murderess relates four stories of his hometown, Oldfield, to a reporter: an elderly man pursues a romance with a younger woman, even to the grave and beyond...a wounded man on the run from creditors is rescued by a backwoods hermit with the secret to eternal life...a glass-eating carny pays the ultimate price for looking for love on the outside...and Civil War soldiers are held captive by a household of orphans with strange intentions for them.

A couple of creative losers accidently become big shots in the video music industry.