After the death of his father, a young New Yorker named Sal (Sam Riley) decides to go on a road trip out west: to meet people, off the beaten track, and just travel. Sometimes alone, but often accompanied by the party boy Dean (Garrett Hedlund), a divorced womanizer travelling with his ex-wife (Kristen Stewart), Sal goes in search of a full slice of life. Taking notes that soon accumulate into a journal, which will one day become a book – a book about his journey across America and the wild, wonderful and tragic things he experiences...

Walter Salles is the first director to dare turn Jack Kerouac's legendary beat novel into a movie. After gaining international attention with the intensely touching story of a boy looking for his father in Central Station, Salles again hit the mark with The Motorcycle Diaries, about young Che Guevara's trip northwards to a notorious future in Cuba. The Brazilian director now takes his audience on a trip across 1950's America to a soundtrack of wild jazz spiced with illegal drugs. A vicarious taste of freedom accompanied by an energetic cast of characters.