Joe Mitchell is a top writer at The New Yorker, specializing in profiles of urban eccentrics. But he's never met anyone as fascinating as Joe Gould, a cantankerous, unkempt, yet possibly brilliant street philosopher.

A group of men have different recollections of a woman they met one night at a bar.

A successful jazz musician whose marriage is on the rocks, a man in black who threatens to expose him, a young mechanic with links to a mobster, and the mobster's moll are all riders on the lost highway, trapped in their worlds of desire, destiny and unknown destination.