The film opens in a park at a child’s birthday party, where someone is attempting to light a firework for the kids’ amusement just as the opening credits begin to roll.
In Haley's hometown, the teenagers dress in their finest outfits for what is described as the most important day of their lives. With a mix of nervous thrill and lingering doubt, they embark on a scattered pilgrimage across town toward an unknown fate. Haley moves at a more reluctant pace, openly questioning the timeworn tradition and the bizarre coming-of-age ritual that awaits them at their destination. She voices her concerns to her two friends, Trish and Gwen, who laugh off her worries and urge her to focus on something else. Meanwhile, one boy, Jim, walking with his group toward Monty’s, suddenly suffers a suspected panic attack and lapses into muteness. His friends press on to Monty’s, debating how best to help him.
When they finally arrive at Monty’s, a beloved local delicatessen, the teens participate in a surreal ceremony of food, dance, and romantic tension that will determine the course of their lives forever. For many, the ritual promises an instantaneous escape from suburban monotony, while a few unchosen souls remain trapped in a vacant, unfulfilling hometown awaiting an uncertain future.
During the ritual, Haley exits Monty’s and later cannot reach either [Trish] and [Gwen], who were selected during a partner ritual. She wanders home in a subdued mood, attempts to contact them multiple times to no avail, and shares an awkward dinner with her parents that underscores the growing distance between her expectations and the world around her.
Back at the park, Jim is hospitalized with a broken leg after a fall into a manhole, and his burdened, disappointed mother accompanies him to a dinner before wheels him in a wheelchair to an abandoned warehouse, leaving him alone with a sparse bag of supplies.
Elsewhere, three burnouts linger over their own existential unease while munching stolen Slim Jims in an empty parking lot. They spend time on hoverboards, then head to a party attended by others living similar, hollow lives. One of the attendees is an aspiring guitarist who works at Monty’s; he clearly resents his job and the fate that seems to bind him to this place. Realizing that a musician’s dream may never come true, he tears at his guitar strings, smashes the instrument with his foot, and his burnout companions drive him home.
The following morning, Haley searches for her friends again, visiting their homes to no avail. She returns to the park seen at the film’s start, observing the people around her as the child’s party continues to unfold, the town quietly moving forward even as some lives diverge dramatically from the expected path.
