In HITCH, Lane, a 36-year-old white man, picks up a young biracial hitchhiker in upstate New York. His casual fantasy of a hook-up with the young woman is blown up when he learns she is escaping from her mother’s abusive boyfriend, and her mother who believes whatever he tells her … and that she carries a rock for protection in close quarters (like his car). Dee’s assumptions about this nearly middle-aged white man who has picked her up are similarly altered over the course of the next 36 hours, as she learns that, far from being the geeky, wannabe ladies man that she presumed, Lane in fact is recovering from a devastating divorce as he drives to pick up his eight-year-old daughter in Terre Haute to take her home to Albany for the summer vacation.

The lies each has carefully told about him/herself to the other begin to unravel. Dee’s father didn’t die in a trucking accident; he abandoned her family. Lane’s philandering didn’t end his marriage; his wife’s did. Dee isn’t going to stay with relatives in Toledo; she’s planning to live on the streets as best she can there. Lane isn’t driving to pick up his daughter; he’s fleeing home having been unable to muster the nerve to face his ex-wife and pick the child up.

In the end, both need to face their demons: Dee, to return home and rescue the little sister she has left behind who she has learned is now being groomed for abuse by her step-father just as Dee was; Lane, to return and pick up his daughter who Dee has taught him is likely heartbroken. In the final scene, Lane helps Dee meet reconnect with her mother in a diner to discuss what to do, although nothing is certain. As the curtain falls, Lane sits alone in his car trying to decide which way to turn onto the interstate: west to home and defeat; or east to his daughter and growth.