故事发生在风景秀丽的密西西比河畔,汤姆(乔纳森·泰勒·托马斯 Jonathan Taylor Thomas 饰)自幼丧母,是一个身世可怜的孤儿。然而,在朋友和亲戚们的帮助和扶持下,汤姆还是成长为了一个快乐勇敢的男孩。哈克贝利(布拉德·兰弗洛 Brad Renfro 饰)是汤姆最好的朋友,两个孩子在一起,常常惹出各种各样的麻烦,闹了数不清的笑话。
一次偶然中,汤姆竟然成为了一宗凶杀案的目击证人,由于害怕遭到凶手的报复,汤姆和哈克贝利决定离家出走,踏上逃亡的旅途。汤姆的失踪让亲人倍感焦急,可他却在孤岛上开辟了自己的小天地,过得逍遥快活。最终,在案件即将审判之时,汤姆站了出来说出了真相,帮助法官做出了公正的判决。
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”