A ten-year-old boy named Gus sets out on a strange quest after his parents argue about another mouth to feed. With his piggy bank emptied and his future looking uncertain, he steals a Ford Mustang and sets his sights on collecting MOTORAMA cards scattered across the country. The promise of a grand prize fuels his journey as he discovers that the cards are only available at a select network of gas stations, turning a child’s escape into a country-spanning test of persistence, luck, and endurance. As Gus pushes forward, he is treated like an adult by strangers who project responsibility onto him, even as the world around him grows harsher and more chaotic.
At a gas station, the escape begins with a tragedy: the attendant, Phil [John Diehl], is struck by a passing truck, a consequence Gus can scarcely comprehend. Later, at a motel where he plans to rest, the proprietor’s world feels colder still, and the motel clerk [Jack Nance] watches over the scene as the owner dispatches squirrels with exhaust fumes. With money running dry, Gus steals more fuel from a couple, only to be caught and knocked unconscious. They take him to their home, and the mood shifts from concern to danger as the pair smear makeup on themselves and on Gus, an act that strongly suggests abuse. The wife [Mary Woronov] and husband [Sandy Baron] make it clear Gus is a child, and they call for medical help. A doctor [Vince Edwards] arrives, but the attempt at care goes awry as the situation devolves into something deeply troubling. When the morning comes, the couple release Gus with a defiant line: the gas is his to keep.
The road grows more brutal and more ridiculous in turns. Gus, now with an eye patched after losing sight in one eye, faces humiliation at the hands of a biker who mocks him as a pirate and forces him to an improbable arm-wrestling contest. He loses and endures a demeaning tattoo that marks him, an unwelcome badge of his misadventures. A rest stop brings another test of nerve when he bets against a father in a casual horseshoes game, a gamble that ends with the man and his wife abandoning their own children and riding away. Gus’s odyssey continues through Essex, a gritty industrial landscape where cruelty and confusion seem to swirl together, and a rain-soaked highway finally lends him a brutal twist of fate: he swerves to avoid a truck, crashing off an unfinished bridge and crippling his car’s ability to function.
Strangely, the journey returns him to a familiar place in a new, almost mythic form. Wandering back along the highway, he encounters an older, crazed version of himself—the result of never receiving that elusive final letter. In a moment that blends memory and fantasy, a mentally challenged gas station attendee hands him a single card, the last piece of his MOTORAMA puzzle. His hair has turned gray, and the world now views him as an old man, so he heads to the company offices to claim his prize, only to learn that collecting all the letters merely makes him “eligible” for the prize, not a winner. The secretary explains that no one is supposed to win Motorama, and a shockingly cold truth settles in: there is no prize. A security guard hurls the tormented Gus out of a skyscraper window.
He sinks into a pool of water, then emerges in the same river where his journey began, and the car that once carried him seems miraculously renewed. His eye is restored, the metal leg extensions he crafted to drive the car are shed, and he hitchhikes home with a stubborn resilience. He discovers Phil has survived the earlier accident, though badly injured, and, with few options left, Gus chooses to stay at Phil’s gas station and help run it. No longer merely a boy, he is now seen, if not quite treated, as an adult by the world around him. The final twist of the tale finds a gambler claiming to have won a million dollars, flashing cash at Gus before speeding away only to perish in a crash—leaving Gus and Phil to tend the quiet, desolate station where life, myth, and memory hang in uneasy balance.
