| Summary: | The more Laura (Vera Farmiga) tries to set boundaries in her life, the faster those lines are crossed. Her 12-year-old son Henry (Lewis MacDougall) is in trouble again at school. Her own penchant for adopting stray dogs and cats threatens to overwhelm their Seattle home. And her phone keeps ringing with calls she refuses to pick up--from her estranged father Jack (Christopher Plummer). 85-year-old Jack has crossed way too many lines himself. Despite his enduring charm, he's being evicted from his senior community for unspecified misdeeds. After a lifetime of letdowns and betrayals, Laura wants nothing to do with him. But now, as an impoverished single mother, Laura needs help: Henry, who's socially awkward and bullied, but sensitive, smart, and funny, has just been expelled. He has employed his considerable artistic talents to draw the school principal nude (and imaginatively posed--naked drawings are a specialty of Henry's). Laura wants to get Henry into a private school where his creativity can be nurtured and his oddball tendencies tolerated, but she needs tuition money. Laura reluctantly makes a deal with Jack: if he'll help her pay for Henry's school, she'll rescue him from being turned out on the street and drive him south from Seattle to Los Angeles, where he will be taken in (reluctantly) by her sister Jojo (Kristen Schaal). Taking a leave from her job as the beleaguered personal assistant to a high-maintenance rich lady (Emily Holmes), and entrusting her menagerie of foundlings to a co-worker with a crush (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), Laura hits the road with Jack and Henry in Jack's elderly Rolls-Royce (Jack has long since lost his license). Jack is an old hand at shamelessly manipulating and deceiving Laura. He quickly enlists Henry's help in carrying out the side hustle he plans for the road trip: unloading his marijuana stash to clients along the coast without Laura catching on. Even though he loves his mom, Henry falls right into the job of assistant dealer with enthusiasm. Laura wants to bomb down to L.A. as quickly as possible, but their route meanders through rural countryside as they visit Jack's old friends and associates. The warm and welcoming hippie household of Stanley (Christopher Lloyd), an art forger, and his son Jed (Halldor Bjarnason) thaws Laura's heart a bit. Bikers, punks, farmers, and even the monks at a Buddhist monastery happily do business with Jack, abetted by Henry. On the one hand, Jack is teaching Henry to lie to his mother and break the law; on the other hand, he's paying much-needed grandfatherly attention to a boy whose own father ditched the family years ago.That feckless father, Leonard (Bobby Cannavale) happens to be living along the road-trip trajectory in a Sausalito houseboat, and also happens to be one of Jack's pot buyers. Motivated by Henry's wish to reconnect with his missing father, but still unaware of the ongoing commerce, Laura agrees to stop by. Unsurprisingly, Leonard pretty much ignores Henry, but finagles his ex, Laura, into bed that night. The attraction is still there, and Laura falls for it--till the next morning, when she finds out he's remarried. Jack chivalrously defends his daughter and grandson by popping Leonard in the nose, and Leonard counters by revealing what's in the trunk of the car--the pot. Laura is livid.Jack promises to ditch all the remaining stash with one more stop to pass it off to Joey, a wealthy retired dealer.
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