Crystal "White Girl" Van Meter Natasha Lyonne is a 15-year-old prostitute who ends up with a 25-year sentence for a lengthy list of crimes that include beating up and robbing her customers. Transferred to a minimum-security hospital to seek treatment for bulimia, White Girl teams up with Angela "Cyclona" Garcia María Celedonio, a teenage lesbian serial killer. Together, they escape from the hospital, even as White Girl injures herself on a barbed-wire fence. Cyclona is convinced her beloved former caretaker Sister Gomez Vincent Gallo can help White Girl with her eating disorder, and they set off for Tijuana.
On the road, Cyclona murders a family and even has sex with the dead bodies. White Girl grows uneasy when Cyclona stops taking her medication and insists on occasional doses to keep them moving together. They steal the family's car and drive south. Along the way, Cyclona reveals how Sister Gomez saved her from abuse by her father and perhaps even aliens. After drinking too many beers and huffing paint, they crash and tumble down a hill, laughing.
Undeterred, the pair hops a freight train, only to be assaulted by a transient crack addict. Cyclona kills him to protect White Girl, and they make off with his bag of crack and firearms. In the woods, they leave a trail of crack that is picked over by shady men with crow feathers on their hats. They reach the border yet are confronted by two customs officials, whom Cyclona kills. White Girl, furious that Cyclona murdered two law-enforcement officers, pistol-whips Cyclona and then they hurry toward the suburbs beyond the border into Tijuana.
In the Mexican border town, White Girl begins to earn money by luring men to dark alleys under the promise of sex and robbing them. Cyclona and White Girl check into a dilapidated motel, where they share a beer, a shower, and a vibrating bed. White Girl caves to Cyclona’s sexual advances, and the two engage in a vigorous lesbian encounter.
After a few days, the lovers discover a poster showing Sister Gomez is in town. Sister Gomez is described as a Catholic/spiritualist healer, and Cyclona is eager to visit her, hoping she can help with their past traumas. They visit Sister Gomez at her gaudy mission house, where she prepares an enormous roast feast for her “little movie star” (Cyclona) and the friend “with the hungry demon” (Crystal), a nod to White Girl’s bulimia.
Cyclona soon disappears, and White Girl is forced to work for Sister Gomez in exchange for food. Exhausted, White Girl descends to the basement, where she finds children captive in a bondage room lit by an UFO-shaped lantern; there is blood everywhere. Cyclona, half-naked in a bondage contraption, reveals that Sister Gomez made her watch as she chopped up children and used their flesh to feed others. She also reveals that Sister Gomez’s ultimate plan for White Girl was to fatten her up with the flesh of the children and then serve White Girl up for dinner.
White Girl concludes that Sister Gomez is the ringleader of a bizarre cult that rapes and eats children and even sells child pornography, all hidden behind the facade of a Catholic mission. Determined to act, White Girl frees Cyclona and defeats the cult members; she also reveals Sister Gomez to be a trans woman. Not even bullets can stop Sister Gomez, who is dragged to the fiery oven, screaming about a 100,000-year history of terror and revenge from her father, Jupiter.
White Girl, keeping a previously made promise, is finally forced to kill Cyclona rather than let her be captured. Cyclona, desiring to leave behind a life of abuse and violence, hopes to be reincarnated as an eagle (a clue that Sister Gomez was her earliest abuser). White Girl negotiates a deal with the federales and leaves with her lawyer/pimp, declaring to the world that she is “not hungry anymore.”
