rapped in his mother's Lower East Side apartment, sixteen-year-old Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin) wants nothing more than to escape New York. He wants to spend the summer in South America studying the Ishkanani Indians (called "Fierce People"), with the anthropologist father he's never met. Finn's dreams are shattered when he is arrested in a desperate effort to help his drug-dependent mother, Liz (Diane Lane), who works as a massage therapist. Determined to get their lives back on track, Liz moves the two of them into a guesthouse for the summer on the vast country estate of her ex-client, the aging aristocratic billionaire, Ogden C. Osbourne (Donald Sutherland).
In Osbourne's close world of privilege and power, Finn and Liz encounter the super rich, a tribe portrayed as fiercer and more mysterious than anything they might find in the South American jungle. (Dirk Wittenborn, the author of the novel on which the film is based, grew up a poor outsider among the super rich in an upper-crust New Jersey enclave.[1])
While Liz battles her substance abuse and struggles to win back her son's love and trust, Finn falls in love with Osbourne's granddaughter, Maya (Kristen Stewart). He also befriends her older brother, Bryce (Chris Evans); and wins the favor of Osbourne. When a shocking act of violence shatters Finn's ascension within the Osbourne clan, the golden promises of this lush world quickly sour. Both Finn and Liz, caught in a harrowing struggle for their dignity, discover that membership in a group comes at a steep price.