- A troubled young man struggling to right himself after the premature death of his father.
- Duncan is a depressed 20-something who has just lost another job. He makes extra money by letting out his flat for his brother's romantic trysts, but when a job comes up as a caretaker in his grandparent's building he takes it. His grandfather has Parkinson's Disease and he and his wife have a caregiver whom Duncan finds compellingly upbeat. As they begin a tentative romance, and Duncan spends more time with his grandparents, he begins to face his feelings about the early loss of his father. A moving drama, set in a frigid Minnesota landscape.—johnno.r[at]xtra.co.nz
- Ever since the death of his father, 25-year-old Minneapolis-born-and-bred Duncan Shorter (Joshua Jackson) is content with shuffling aimlessly through life ditching one dead-end job after another. His brother, big-shot Jake (Steven Pasquale) uses his appartment sometimes, to meet with Sandy, (Katie Griffin), his lover, cheating on his wife Cara (Krista Bridges). Dunc asks his friend Finn (Tyler Lavine) to give him a job, but he doesn't trust him at all.
Things change when Duncan takes a job near his ill grandfather Ronald (Donald Sutherland) and his grandmother Ruth (Louise Fletcher). Duncan starts working as a maintenance odd-jobs man.
Ronald suffers from Parkinson and Alhzeimer. Duncan starts dating caregiver Kate (Juliette Lewis). They three laugh about the name of the President of the day. In one moment of excitement, when Ruth is trying to play Ronald a magic trick, he smashes everything with a hammer.
Kate takes Dunc to work and they chat. Later on, they go to a rock concert. Dunc also meets his gang of friends. Hack (Timm Sharp) is going to pretend to be a native-American Indian so that he can shag more women.
Next, Dunc and Jake go hunting deer, but the former keeps on missing on purpose.
Ronald has got a shotgun, but no ammunition. He asks Dunc to help him commit suicide.
At work, Mrs Hollerich (Joyce Champion) a crazy lady who dislikes black people wants Dunc to do some errands for her instead of his boss, (Mark Andrada). She also has the obsession of thinking that everybody steals things from her.
All the family and Kate spend Thanksgiving at the home of Jake Shorter, with Jake, his wife and two daughters. They have a little row because Ronald says he can see the Northern lights.
Kate and Dunc's relationship is going well. They go snow-sliding with his school friens. Later, Kate gets annoyed with Dunc because he doesn't take seriously the possibility of becoming an engineer. Kate has the possibility of staying at San Diego at a nice mansion close to the sea for a year. Kate wants Dunc to go with her.
Mrs Hollerich sees some little private property of hers among Dunc's staff at work. His boss says that, is she complains, Dunc will have to quit.
At his grandparents' Dunc puts a bullet inside the shotgun. Ronald is eager to do it, but Dunc avoids it in a last-second decision. Ronald gets angry, and suffers a heart attack.
After the funeral, Jake and Dunc share the latter's flat, because Cara has finally got wind of his affair with Sandy and threw him out of the house.
After having received a postcard from San Diego with Kate's address on it, Duncan finally decides to grow up and make all the way down to where she lives. While he is waiting at the petrol station for his car to be mended, he asks Stu (John Kapelos) if his father has died of an overdose. Stu and Dunc's father were best buddies, although both used to be addicted to drugs. Both had quitted, and both were hanging out together when Stu's father died. Stu tells him that his father han't started taking drugs again. It was a weird accident. He left when Stu and other people were taking drugs, so that he wouldn't follow them.
The first thing Dunc tells Kate when he arrives at sunny San Diego is that he has been accepted at San Diego's university.
They kiss.
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