Twenty-year-old Baby is leaving Tennessee behind. With little money, no real safety net, and a stubborn certainty that she is meant for something bigger, she sets out just before Christmas for Los Angeles to become an actress. But when her improvised bus trip falls apart in Memphis, Baby makes a riskier choice: she starts hitchhiking west.
That is when she meets Whit, a twenty-one-year-old Vanderbilt student driving home to Beverly Hills for Christmas. Whit comes from a wealthy, loving family that has spent his entire life planning, worrying, and stepping in before anything can go wrong. After leaving Nashville several days later than he was supposed to, he is determined to make it across the country himself, even as his parents repeatedly offer easier ways home.
Baby has spent years learning to depend on almost no one. Whit has spent years struggling to prove that he can depend on himself. When they discover they are both headed to Los Angeles, what begins as a reluctant ride becomes a cross-country journey together.
As they move west through cheap motels, truck stops, wind farms, bad fast food, crowded restaurants, and hundreds of miles of open highway, Baby pushes Whit outside the carefully controlled life he knows. Whit, meanwhile, offers Baby something she is far less comfortable accepting: stability, generosity, and the possibility that someone might actually stay when given the chance to leave.
Their growing friendship is funny, messy, and increasingly difficult to define. But the closer they become, the harder it is for either of them to hide the things they brought onto the road with them. Questions of money, family, trust, grief, and independence begin to expose how differently they have learned to survive and how much those differences have shaped the people they are trying to become.
Set against the strange isolation of a cross-country trip at Christmas, California, Baby is a coming-of-age road film about two young people trying to prove they can make it on their own, only to discover that growing up may have just as much to do with who you are willing to trust along the way.