In the America of the near future, California has become a desolate wasteland controlled by violent separatist militias and marked by a lack of water and fuel. In a village outside Reno, Nevada, a middle-aged man visits an undertaker and gathers the ashes of his dead wife to bring to Alaska, where their children await. To reach them, the man must go north by bike across a treacherous, violent landscape, his dog his only companion.

Thirty years earlier, we meet Roy Bingham. After a rough-and-tumble childhood, Roy numbs himself with skateboarding, drugs, and sex. Then he meets Karen Oronski. Sassy, soulful, and arresting, Karen pulls Roy into her orbit until she decides to give up their nomadic lifestyle and put down roots in her hometown of Loyalton, California. Roy buckles under the commitment, and after a boozy night in Reno, he leaves Karen for the road and skateboarding.

Flashing back and forth in time across four decades in the life of a man who is lost even when he’s found, Trouble No Man delivers a resonant story of survival and family, set against the tumult of an America on the precipice of becoming an unfree nation.