It is 1984 in Northern California, where a group of Americans are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties, still run by the passions of those times, sexual and political which have refused to die. Zoyd Wheeler is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend as an official mental degenerate) when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past with news that an old nemesis, Federal Prosecutor Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force.