The film is based on the real-life experiences of Dave Fishwick. It follows the story of a Burnley self-made millionaire who struggles to set up a community bank to help the town's local businesses to thrive. To do so, he must battle London's elite financial institutions and compete for the first banking licence in more than 150 years.

Friends Felix and Leon are driving to Felix's family holiday home on the Baltic Sea not far from Ahrenshoop when their car breaks down. After walking through the forest with their luggage, they arrive at the house to find it unexpectedly inhabited by Nadja, whose presence is obvious though they do not meet her. Her romantic trysts keep them up at night, causing Leon to resent her. Over the course of their vacation forest fires are mentioned, first distantly, then approaching. Leon spends his time fussing over the manuscript of his second novel, while Felix is less hurried about completing his photography portfolio. Within a couple days, they have both met Nadja, who is kind and accommodating. Despite this, Leon continues to be frustrated by her. Meanwhile, Felix strikes up a friendship with her and her lover, Devid, a lifeguard at the nearby beach. The emotions among the four intensify as Leon broods and resists interacting with the others. Felix and Devid develop a romantic and sexual relationship. Nadja offers friendship to Leon but he struggles to accept it. After much consternation, he decides to grant her request to read his manuscript, which she finds inferior and she tells him that he knows its poor quality. Leon does not take this well and isolates himself for the rest of the evening. When Leon's publisher Helmut arrives so they can review the manuscript together, Leon grows even more despondent as Helmut connects more with Felix, Devid, and especially Nadja, who is revealed to be a doctoral candidate in literature, not the seasonal hotel employee Leon thought. After a dinner that is tense for Leon and enjoyable for the rest, the forest fires are close enough that ash begins to fall just as Devid and Felix finally leave to retrieve their abandoned car. Helmut suffers a medical emergency. Nadja is quick to act, driving Helmut's tiny rental car to the hospital. Leon follows on foot. On the way, he sees wild boar fleeing the fire. After he watches a boar die, the fire begins to crest the hill and he runs. In darkness, he reaches the hospital to join Nadja, asleep on a bench. When they wake in the morning and find Helmut, he shares private moments with both of them. Nadja asks about his health, which he has lied about so as not to trouble them, and informs him of Leon's distress. Helmut comforts Leon, advising him to abandon his work-in-progress but assuring him of eventual success. Helmut promises to help him as long as his condition allows. On the walk back to the house, Nadja offers Leon comfort which Leon angrily rejects, leading Nadja to castigate him for his self-centeredness before leaving him alone on the beach. Remorseful, he follows her back to the house where he begins to confess romantic feelings for her, just as she sees two police officers in the backyard. Nadja approaches them and they inform her that Devid and Felix were found burned to death by the fires. Nadja and Leon go to see their bodies and see their charred corpses intertwined in death. Nadja has a profound emotional reaction, but Leon cannot absorb the reality, instead thinking about other coupled corpses throughout history, such as those found at Pompeii. She leaves without him, and by the time he reaches the vacation house she has left. He goes to the beach and sobs, looking at the bioluminescence in the sea, something he had refused to do earlier. Some time later, Leon is in Helmut's hospital room as Helmut reads Leon's new manuscript back to him, a work of autofiction based on the time he shared with Felix, Nadja, and Devid. Together they look at photos Felix took that summer which Helmut wants to use as accompanying artwork for the novel. Helmut has Leon leave when a medic appears to administer a treatment. Waiting outside, Leon sees Nadja arriving, presumably to visit Helmut. He steps out from hiding and the two share a moment of mutual recognition.

Patrick, Tim, and Georgie are firefighters who live and work together. After saving two children from a fire, they are hailed as heroes of New Orleans. While on a fishing trip with his girlfriend Sophia, Patrick claims to witness a 35-foot long shark. Although he repeatedly tries to warn his friends, they do not believe him and insist there are no sharks in the Mississippi River. Eventually, Patrick is vindicated when shark attacks are reported on the local news. The shark is carried abreast of flood water through the streets of the city, eating people. Patrick and Tim set out across New Orleans to save the city from the shark, and scenes in which they search for or flee from it are interspersed with scenes of interactions with their girlfriends and socializing at a bar. Meanwhile, their boss, Captain Joe, procures scuba gear for them and implores them to help save the city. Tim receives a treasure map from an old man in the bar, marking where the shark sleeps, though Patrick expresses some confusion over whether or not sharks sleep. While playing pool, Patrick and Tim conceive a plan to place a tracking device on the shark, follow it in their scuba gear, and feed it dynamite hidden inside a pig carcass. After obtaining the bait, they spear the shark with the tracking device, but the animal retaliates and eats Georgie. Tim and Patrick visit a shrine erected in Georgie's honor on the beach, and together mourn their friend's death by composing a song. With the tracking device in place, Tim and Patrick pursue the shark into the bayou and kill it by tricking it into eating the bomb. Initially, Tim seems to die in the explosion, but it is revealed that he was only flung high in the air and survives. The heroes celebrate by dancing in the streets of New Orleans with a marching band.

Teenager Dallas Edwards and his derelict friends go on a quest for the meaning behind a series of mysterious, paranormal events in Southern California.

A New York couple, Rachel and Alvy, live in a not-so-distant future. A rising tech company executive, Rachel lands a coveted spot on the waitlist for the Womb Center, which offers couples maternity by way of detachable artificial wombs, or pods. Alvy, a botanist with an affection for nature, prefers a natural pregnancy. Despite their different perspectives, they decide to go forward with the Womb Center's services in order to conceive a child.

In 1966 Southern California, Richard Montañez grows up as a hard-working child with a strict father and supportive grandfather. He meets his future wife Judy in school where he sells burritos to other children. He is arrested at a young age when nobody believes that he earned his money honestly. As adults, Richard and Judy marry but live as hoodlums in a gang, hustling to survive. They make an effort to turn their lives around once Judy gets pregnant with their first child. After one last arrest, the judge tells him to change his way of life. A second child later, Richard and his family struggle to make ends meet. Richard turns to his friend, former hoodlum Tony Romero, who helps him get a job at Frito-Lay. Despite lying on his resumé, he is hired by floor head Lonny Mason. Richard pays attention to the nuances of the factory and asks engineer maintenance leader Clarence C. Baker to teach him about the machines. Baker teaches Richard how to operate all the machinery in the factory. Unfortunately, the Reagan administration severely affects low-paying jobs, and Frito-Lay's stocks go down. This results in some of the workers getting laid off. Frito-Lay CEO Roger Enrico releases a video encouraging the workers to "think like a CEO," which inspires Richard. He takes his kids out for elotes (Mexican street corn). Noticing that his youngest son Steven likes the spicy flavor, he realizes that the way to save Frito-Lay is to pitch the brand to the Latino market. He convinces Baker and the rest of his coworkers to let him take some unflavored Cheetos home, but Judy suggests that he talk to his father Vacho first about a job. Vacho belittles Richard's plans, causing Judy to support Richard even more. The Montañezes work tirelessly trying to find the perfect spicy flavor for Cheetos, eventually getting the right concoction. Richard attempts to pitch his idea to Lonny only to be turned down, forcing him to sneak in and copy Enrico's phone number. Richard gets through to Enrico, who is intrigued to learn that he saw his video and asks that he send his flavored Cheetos. He tastes them and is hooked, setting up a meeting at the factory. Richard speaks from the heart, and his pitch is accepted with the Flamin' Hot Cheetos being put into production. While this results in more jobs, the new flavor is not flying off the shelves. Richard's children point out that there are no advertisements for the flavor. Richard returns to work and implores everyone to use their skills to sell the new flavor from the street. The tactic works, and Enrico calls to ask that the factory produce an even bigger order. While Baker gets the promotion he always desired, Richard is still a janitor. Lonny asks Richard to clean upstairs, only to find Enrico, who tells him that he understands his struggles growing up before revealing that he has been promoted to Director of Multicultural Marketing. Richard is applauded by his coworkers and happily calls Judy to tell her the good news.

In Waterloo, Ontario in 1996, Research in Motion (RIM) CEO Mike Lazaridis and his best friend and co-founder Douglas Fregin prepare to pitch their "PocketLink" cellular device to businessman Jim Balsillie. Their pitch is unsuccessful, but after Balsillie is fired from his job due to his aggressive ambition, he offers to invest $20,000 for 50% of the company and a position as CEO. Lazaridis, prompted by Fregin, initially declines Balsillie's offer, but after confirming Balsillie's suspicion that their $16 million deal with USRobotics was in bad faith, they bring Balsillie in as a co-CEO with Lazaridis and sell him a 33% stake in RIM for $125,000. After joining RIM, Balsillie discovers that the company is in a dire financial position and he mortgages his house to add a cash infusion to make payroll. Balsillie arranges a pitch for the PocketLink with Bell Atlantic and forces Fregin and Lazaridis to build a crude prototype overnight, which he and Lazaridis take to New York. Lazaridis forgets the prototype in their taxi, leaving Balsillie to attempt the pitch alone. Lazaridis recovers the prototype at the last second and finishes the pitch, and they rebrand the PocketLink as the " BlackBerry ", which becomes massively successful. In 2003, Palm Inc. CEO Carl Yankowski plans a hostile takeover of the immensely successful RIM, leading Balsillie to try to raise RIM's stockprice by selling more phones than Bell Atlantic's (now Verizon Communications) network can support. This does crash the network, as Lazaridis had warned, so Balsillie poaches engineers from around the world to fix the problem, as well as hiring a man named Charles Purdy as RIM's chief operating officer to keep the engineers in line. Purdy's employment upsets Fregin, who values the casual and fun work environment he and Lazaridis had created. The new engineers fix the network issue under Purdy's strict management, and RIM avoids Yankowski's buyout. In 2007, RIM's upcoming pitch of the BlackBerry Bold to Verizon is thrown into chaos when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone, much to Lazaridis and Fregin's irritation. Balsillie, a hockey fan with a long-term ambition of owning an NHL team, is occupied with trying to purchase the Pittsburgh Penguins, forcing Lazaridis to pitch the Bold with Fregin instead. When it goes poorly, he panics and impulsively promises them the BlackBerry Storm, a touchscreen device. As Lazaridis finally agrees with Purdy's suggestion to outsource the labor of the Storm to China, he insults Fregin during an argument. Fregin later quits RIM as a result. Balsillie becomes nervous when he sees the iPhone's projected sales and tries to arrange a meeting with the CEO of AT&T, only to learn that the Penguins sale is being finalized that day. He prioritizes the Penguins but is rejected when the NHL owners reveal knowledge of his plan to move the team to Hamilton, which they learned of through his boasting to Yankowski. The US SEC raid RIM after learning that Balsillie hired the engineers in 2003 with illegally backdated stock options, threatening Lazaridis with legal action. Balsillie misses his chance to meet with AT&T's CEO, who snubs Balsillie by hinting that AT&T's partnership with Apple is predicated on the fact that data usage has superseded phone minutes as a priority. Balsillie returns to RIM to find that Lazaridis has exposed him to the SEC, leaving Lazaridis as the sole CEO of RIM. One year later, the Storms arrive from China, but Lazaridis finds them to be laden with bugs and can hear buzzing when he holds one to his ear. He begins manually fixing the buzzing phones one by one. Captions over the film's closing titles reveal that the Storms were almost universally inoperable and Verizon sued RIM to cover the financial loss. Lazaridis resigned as CEO in 2012, Balsillie avoided jail, and Fregin had secretly became one of the richest men in the world by selling his stock in 2007 after he left RIM. At the height of RIM's success, BlackBerry phones made up 45% of the cell phone market; today their market share is 0%, and BlackBerry phones are no longer produced.

In 2200, Aline Ruby, a private detective, and Carlos Rivera, an android replica of her partner who died five years earlier, are sent to Earth to capture Roberta Williams, a robot-hacking criminal. Back on Mars, Roberta's arrest warrant has disappeared and she is released. A new investigation is entrusted to the duo: to track down Jun Chow, a cybernetics student known for illegally jailbreaking androids who, like her roommate, has gone missing. Aline and Carlos venture to the depths of Noctis, the main terrestrial establishment of Mars created thanks to the progress of robotics, and where humans and various forms of androids seem to coexist in harmony. The city turns out to hide secrets such as trafficking and clandestine computer labs. Meanwhile, activists try to free the robots from the security constraints that bind them to humans. Ultimately, the robots are successfully emancipated and revolt, but peacefully, by uploading their consciousnesses to computers aboard spaceships and thus escaping to space. Carlos, grief-stricken by the loss of his partner and realizing that he is a dead consciousness embodied in a machine who has been "trying to hold onto a life that's moved on without him", decides to go with the robots.

Sophie, a teenage girl, has a dream in which she sees a man raking leaves by a swimming pool. She suddenly starts floating up to the sky and cries out to the man for help, revealing that he is her father Paul, a professor of evolutionary biology at a local university. When Paul learns that a former colleague is writing an article on a topic he had discussed with her many years earlier, he seeks to confront her but instead begs her for some recognition. Paul's journalist ex-girlfriend Claire spots him with his wife Janet and tells him he appears in her dreams. With his permission, she writes an article about the experience. Soon, hundreds of strangers come forward to name Paul as the man they see in their dreams. Paul enjoys the media coverage this brings, but is frustrated by consistently being depicted in the dreams as passive and uninteresting. In interviews with some of his students, he learns that their dreams sometimes feature disasters occurring or the dreamers asking Paul for help, only for him to remain emotionless and unhelpful. Janet asks Paul why he does not appear in her dreams, and describes her fantasy of Paul rescuing her while wearing the oversized suit worn by David Byrne in the 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. Later that evening, a mentally ill man who has seen Paul in his dreams breaks into their house with a knife, raising concerns about the risks of his fame. Paul meets with a PR firm in the hopes of securing a book deal, but they instead attempt to convince him to advertise Sprite on social media. Molly, a young assistant at the firm, tells Paul that she has erotic dreams about him; he attempts to re-enact them for her, but prematurely ejaculates and leaves her apartment in shame. Paul is enraged to learn that his former colleague has published a high-profile paper on the subject about which he was thinking of writing his book. His presence in people's dreams becomes violent and sadistic, and he becomes vilified, being placed on leave after students refuse to attend his classes. Bystanders are bothered by his presence in public, resulting in a brawl at a diner. After Janet's career is affected, she asks Paul to issue a public apology, but he angrily refuses. Paul has a nightmare in which he is hunted and killed by a version of himself wielding a crossbow and subsequently releases a self-pitying apology video. Humiliated, Janet throws him out of the house. Paul forces his way into his daughter's school play but accidentally injures a teacher in the process and is restrained, becoming further vilified. Some time later, Paul ceases to appear in people's dreams. His own dream experience is revealed to have led to the discovery of a shared subconsciousness, and dreams have become an advertising space through the use of technology. Janet is separated from Paul and is dating a co-worker. Paul travels to France for a book tour to promote his book Dream Scenario, which he learns has been retitled Je suis ton cauchemar (I Am Your Nightmare) without his consent. The book is pitifully thin in the translated volume and his signing event has been moved to the dingy basement of the bookstore. Nevertheless, fans line up for his signed copies. Paul uses "dream travel" technology to enter one of Janet's dreams and rescue her while wearing the oversized suit. As he floats away, much like Sophie did in her first dream, Paul declares that he wishes the dream were reality.