A brand new Plymouth Volare sits in an Arizona high school parking lot with a yellow bow on its hood. Joyce is eighteen, certain she is going to be somebody. Her father gives her the car and a speech she half-listens to. She points it west.

Los Angeles is not interested. The auditions lead nowhere. The roles that come are humiliating. Then she meets a man on a film set - beautiful, reckless, magnetically wrong for her - and the car watches as he slowly takes the wheel. The drugs arrive gradually enough that no one marks the exact moment things go wrong. The girl who sang on the highway to LA is still in there somewhere. She just stops showing up.

Eventually the boyfriend sells the car for drug money. Joyce watches it go without fighting for it.

A lost decade follows - the car passing through a musician, a cheater, a gambler. By the time it reaches Javier it has stopped expecting much. Which is exactly when Javier proves it wrong.

Javier is eighteen, delivering pizzas, in love with Lorena, planning a repair shop with his father. He and his dad work on the Plymouth together. The car is not just transportation. It is the future, made physical.

Then Lorena goes into labor two weeks early. False alarm - but she stays admitted. The baby is coming any hour. And Javier is cut loose into Los Angeles with a full day he cannot cancel.

A repair job in West Hills. His grandmother to collect from LAX. A debt to chase. Lorena's family's errands he cannot skip. Spare parts to sell at a swap meet. A garage deposit due today or the dream dies. A pager going off every hour. A car that breaks down twice. He runs it all from behind the wheel.

Everything comes together at the last minute. He is heading back to the hospital when he remembers: Twizzlers. He pulls into a 7-Eleven. Goes inside.

He comes back out and the car is gone. Javier stands in the parking lot, bags in both hands, staring at empty asphalt. Lorena is in labor. He has no car. The city is enormous and he is standing perfectly still.

Rico and Lola took the car. A hustler and the woman who is sharper than him in every way and loves him anyway. She is pregnant. This is their last job - one more score for the Armenian gangster Sarik, then Phoenix, clean living, a real life.

Everything goes wrong. Someone dies who was not supposed to. They escape with Sarik wounded in the backseat. At a gas station in the desert Sarik goes inside and Lola turns to Rico: who do you want to be, because I am not raising a child in this. Rico decides. They leave Sarik and point the car toward Arizona.

The car is barely holding together. But it gets them to Phoenix. Then it stops for good.

Years pass. A Phoenix street. A junkyard. A dusty barn. An eBay listing. The car is delivered to a garage in Los Angeles.

Older Javier walks in. He recognized something in a YouTube video - the rosary glimpsed in the corner of the frame. He opens the door and sits. Then he reaches into his pocket and hangs the rosary back on the mirror where it belongs. He found it on the street the night the car was stolen. He kept it all these years.

He brings his daughter in. They restore it together. When it is ready they take it out. The narration returns fully. The camera pulls back through the rear window onto open road. The car has nothing left to prove.