In Los Angeles, Barry Egan is a bachelor who owns a company that markets themed toilet plungers and other novelty items. He has seven overbearing sisters who regularly ridicule and emotionally abuse him, and he leads a lonely life punctuated by fits of rage and social anxiety. One day, Barry witnesses an inexplicable car accident, picks up an abandoned harmonium from the street, and meets Lena Leonard, a co-worker of Elizabeth, one of his sisters. Lena had orchestrated the meeting after seeing him in Elizabeth's family picture at work. Barry attends his sister's birthday party, where they tease him about his sexuality, leading to a violent outburst in which he breaks sliding glass doors. Afterwards, he privately asks his brother-in-law to refer him to a therapist. At home, Barry calls a phone sex line to cope with his loneliness. The phone sex operator tries to extort money from him and then sends four henchmen, who are brothers, to collect. This complicates his budding relationship with Lena, as well as his plan to exploit a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotion and amass a million frequent-flyer miles by purchasing large quantities of pudding. When Lena leaves for Hawaii on a business trip, Barry decides to follow her. He uses his sister to find Lena, who is overjoyed to see him. As the two spend time together, Barry's sister calls Lena, who lies to her about being in contact with him. The romance develops further, leading to Barry's relief from his emotional isolation. On the return trip, the four brothers ram Barry's car, mildly injuring Lena. After fighting them off with a tire iron, Barry leaves her at the hospital and sets out to end the harassment. He calls the phone sex line back and discovers the "supervisor" is the owner of a mattress store. Barry drives all the way to Provo, Utah, to confront the owner, Dean, face to face. At first, trying to intimidate Barry, Dean finds him more intimidating once he learns that he has come all the way from California. They both agree "that's that". Returning home, Barry visits Lena to explain why the accident happened. He begs for forgiveness, pledging his loyalty and to use his frequent-flyer miles to accompany her on all future business trips after his pudding miles are processed. Lena confesses she was more upset at being left at the hospital, but forgives Barry and they embrace.

Lars Lindstrom lives a quiet life in a small town. His mother died when he was born, causing his grief-stricken father to have been a distant parent to Lars and his older brother, Gus. Gus feels guilty for leaving as soon as he could to support himself; Lars struggles with the loss of his mother during his birth and an irrational fear about the risk of death during childbirth. As a result, he exhibits avoidance behaviors and is avoidant of touching others (haphephobia), causing social awkwardness and isolation. Having inherited the family home after their father's death, the two brothers live on the property along with Gus's wife, Karin. Lars lives in the converted garage, while Gus and Karin, who is pregnant with their first child, live in the main house. Despite Karin's efforts to bring Lars out of his shell, interacting with or relating to his family and co-workers is very difficult for him. A colleague at his office, Margo, also tries to engage him, but Lars is impervious to her attempts. One evening, Lars announces that he has a visitor whom he met online, a wheelchair-mobile missionary of Brazilian and Danish descent named Bianca. Gus and Karin are startled to discover that Bianca is actually a lifelike doll, ordered from an adult website, whom Lars treats as a live human being. Concerned about his mental health, they convince him to take Bianca to see the family doctor, Dagmar Berman, who is also a psychologist. Berman diagnoses Bianca with low blood pressure and urges Lars to return under the guise of "weekly treatments" for Bianca, while actually analyzing Lars. During this time, Margo has begun to date another co-worker, which silently bothers Lars. Lars introduces Bianca as his girlfriend to his co-workers and various townspeople. Sympathetic to Lars, the town inhabitants react to the doll as if she were real; however, in order to reduce Lars's dependence on her, they fill her "schedule" with social events and volunteer programs. When Margo reveals to Lars she has broken up with her boyfriend, he agrees to go bowling with her while Bianca attends a school board meeting; later they are joined by more friends. One morning, Gus and Karin are awakened by a panicked Lars, alarmed because Bianca is unresponsive, and she is rushed to the hospital. After Lars tells Gus and Karin that Bianca is dying, Berman explains that Lars alone has made these decisions about Bianca's future. During a last visit to the lake, Gus and Karin witness a despondent Lars in the water with a "dying" Bianca. Bianca's funeral is well-attended by the townspeople; after she is buried, Lars and Margo linger at the gravesite. When Margo suggests they catch up with the others, Lars asks if she would like to take a walk. She accepts.

In the Welsh seaside city of Swansea, Oliver Tate is an eccentric, unpopular 15-year-old who is infatuated with his mischievous classmate, Jordana Bevan. After Oliver bullies another female classmate to impress Jordana, she invites him to meet secretly after school, before taking pictures of her and Oliver kissing. Jordana uses the pictures to make her ex-boyfriend Mark jealous, resulting in Oliver being beaten up by Mark at school for refusing to call Jordana a "slut". Jordana becomes Oliver's girlfriend and, after a couple of weeks, they lose their virginity to each other in his bedroom while his parents are out. Oliver begins to suspect that his mother Jill is having an affair with a previous lover, New Age motivational speaker Graham Purvis, who has moved in next door with his girlfriend Kim-Lin. Worried about his parents' marriage, he monitors their sex life by checking the dimmer switch in their bedroom, concluding that they have not had sex for seven months. After spotting Jill in town with Graham and overhearing her talk about him on the phone, Oliver tries to warn his depressed father Lloyd, who dismisses his suspicions. Oliver spies on Jill attending one of Graham's seminars, where Graham tells her that he has broken up with Kim-Lin. As Oliver's relationship with Jordana grows, she reveals that her mother has been diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumour. At an awkward early Christmas dinner at Jordana's house, Oliver is welcomed by her parents but witnesses her father break down emotionally after a dimmer switch stops working. Despite agreeing to visit Jordana's mother at the hospital the day of her operation, Oliver loses his nerve and temporarily disappears from Jordana's life so he can focus on salvaging his parents' marriage, planning to resume his relationship with Jordana afterwards. On the night of New Year's Eve, Jill goes to the beach with Graham. While searching for Jill on the crowded beach, Oliver is stunned to see Jordana with another boy. He then spies on his mother entering the back of Graham's van and assumes the worst. Enraged, he goes home and takes several of Lloyd's antidepressants before breaking into Graham's house, where he gets drunk and commits minor acts of vandalism. Upon returning home, Graham finds an intoxicated Oliver, Graham later drops Oliver off at his doorstep and leaves. The next morning, Oliver awakes to see that his parents are not angry with him and are reconciling, though Jill admits that she gave Graham a handjob. Jordana breaks up with Oliver via a letter informing him that she is seeing someone else and that her mother's operation was successful; he becomes depressed over the next few months. At school, Oliver is commonly harassed by classmate Chips. Oliver later apologises to Jordana for not visiting her mother at the hospital, hoping she will leave her new boyfriend for him, but she rejects him. Oliver later encounters Jordana on the beach at sunset, learning that she does not actually have a new boyfriend. She declares that Oliver was horrible to her, and he admits that he made a mistake. Together, they walk several inches deep into the sea, smiling at each other as the sun shines at them.

In 1850 Oregon Territory, backwoodsman Adam Pontipee goes to town for supplies and to find a bride. He meets Milly, the pretty young cook at the town bar. Seeing her strength, hardworking attitude, and culinary skills, he proposes. She accepts and they immediately marry, but upon arriving at the Pontipee mountain homestead, Milly discovers that Adam has six younger brothers—Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank, and Gideon—who are uncouth and expect Milly to clean and cook for them. Milly angrily ruins dinner and retreats to the bedroom, where she bans Adam from their bed. Adam, unwilling to go back downstairs and face his brothers' mockery, crawls out the window to sleep in a nearby tree; eventually, Milly and Adam reconcile, with Milly regretting her high hopes concerning marriage. Milly begins teaching Adam's brothers hygiene and manners; eventually, this extends to advice on romance and courtship. At a town barn-raising event, the Pontipees display their newly acquired social graces as they meet Dorcas, Ruth, Martha, Liza, Sarah, and Alice, who are immediately attracted to the brothers. The women's initial suitors, overcome with jealousy, attack the Pontipees during the barn-raising. Although they keep their tempers initially, they fight back when Adam is attacked unprovoked. In the ensuing brawl, the barn is destroyed. As winter sets in, the brothers pine for their loves back in town. To console them, Adam reads from Milly's copy of Plutarch 's Parallel Lives about the Sabine women, whom the ancient Romans kidnapped to be their wives. Adam then claims his brothers should do the same to get their prospective brides. The Pontipees sneak into town at night and kidnap the women. As they race back to the homestead, the brothers trigger an avalanche that blocks the mountain pass, stopping their pursuers. However, the Pontipees realize they neglected to procure a parson to conduct the wedding ceremonies and are snowed in until spring. Milly is furious with Adam and the brothers and exiles them to the barn while the women stay in the house. Humiliated and angered by Milly's rebuke, Adam leaves for the Pontipees' trapping cabin to spend the winter alone. Over the winter, the women vent their anger by pranking the brothers, but their feelings gradually soften towards them. Meanwhile, Milly reveals she is expecting a baby. By springtime, the women and the Pontipees have happily paired off. When Milly has a baby girl, Gideon goes to inform Adam, who refuses to return. Gideon chastises Adam over his selfishness and behavior towards Milly. Adam returns after the snow melts and meets his daughter. He and Milly reconcile. Adam admits that being a father, he now understands how families feel about their daughters and tells his brothers they must return the women. The heartbroken brothers agree to take them home. However, the women hide and refuse to go back. As the brothers search, the women's angry families reach the Pontipees' homestead. As the townsmen sneak up to the farm, Alice's father, Reverend Elcott, hears a baby crying. Fearing the worst, he asks the women whose baby it is. They immediately conspire together and simultaneously answer "mine!" The fathers begrudgingly allow their daughters to marry the brothers in a collective shotgun wedding.

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.

Shaun, a mischievous sheep living with his flock at Mossy Bottom Farm, is bored with the routine of life on the farm. He concocts a plan to have a day off by tricking the farmer into going back to sleep by counting his sheep repeatedly. However, the caravan in which they put the farmer to bed accidentally rolls away, taking him into a city. Bitzer, the farmer's dog, chases after him. The farmer receives a blow to the head and is taken to a hospital, where he is diagnosed with amnesia. Upon leaving, he wanders into a hair salon and, acting on a vague recollection of shearing his sheep, cuts a celebrity's hair. The celebrity loves the result and the farmer gains popularity as a hair stylist called "Mr. X". Meanwhile, the sheep find life impossible without the farmer, so Shaun sneaks onto a bus to the city; to his surprise, the rest of the flock follow him on another bus. They disguise themselves as people and begin looking for the farmer, but Shaun is caught by Trumper, an animal control worker. Shaun is reunited with Bitzer in the animal lock-up, and with the help of a homeless dog named Slip, they manage to escape while imprisoning Trumper. They find the farmer, but he does not recognise them because of his amnesia and shoos them away. Heartbroken, Shaun, Bitzer, and the flock take shelter in a dark alleyway, where they find evidence of the farmer's amnesia, lifting their spirits. They put the farmer to sleep again, returning him to the trailer on a pantomime horse. They are attacked by Trumper with a taser, who is then pulled down the alleyway. At the farm, the group hides in a shed. Trumper uses the farmer's tractor in an attempt to push the shed into a nearby rock quarry. The farmer wakes up, and, seeing his reflection with the animals, regains his memories. The animals and farmer work together to stop Trumper, and he is ultimately defeated when a bull sends him flying over the quarry and into some manure. Slip leaves, but is adopted by a bus driver who finds her on the road. The farmer and the animals have a renewed appreciation for each other, and the next day, the farmer cancels the routine activities for an official week off. The animal control service is turned into an animal protection centre, Trumper finds work wearing a chicken suit to promote a restaurant as a punishment for his crimes, and the farmer sees a news report detailing some of the mayhem he slept through during his rescue from the city, much to his and the animals' shock.

Vincent, a real estate agent and father-to-be is invited for dinner by his sister Elisabeth and his brother-in-law Pierre. Their childhood friend, Claude (a trombonist for Radio France's orchestra), is also invited. Vincent is a wealthy, successful businessman, while Pierre, a university professor, is much more liberal. Elisabeth is a high school teacher for literature. Vincent's wife Anna is running late because of a business meeting. While waiting for dinner to be served, Vincent decides to play a practical joke by pretending that his unborn son will be named Adolphe after the French literary hero. This causes a huge argument between Vincent and Pierre about whether this name can be appropriate considering its obvious connection to Adolf Hitler. Vincent tells Claude that this is a joke and Elisabeth is too busy preparing dinner to fully participate. This argument escalates and exposes a variety of old grievances and resentments between the four friends. Vincent is selfish, hypocritical and vain, with a humorous facial expression whenever he lies. Pierre is snobbish, miserly and condescending while Vincent finds the names of his children absurd. While Claude is mocked for his surname and his effeminate habits. Meanwhile, Elisabeth continues to be occupied by cooking and angry that the three men keep joking around without her. There is a lull in the argument until Anna arrives which reignites the conversation and exposes more rifts between all the characters. Some huge revelations are brought to light after the meal is finished. Claude resents the questioning of his sexuality and reveals he has been seeing a woman for a while now but refuses to divulge more information. Pierre confesses to having killed a family pet during their childhood when Vincent had taken the blame for it at the time. Meanwhile, Anna is frustrated that Vincent has not tried to learn more about her career despite her success. When pressed for more information about his mysterious partner, Claude eventually reveals that it is Vincent and Elisabeth's mother Françoise. In his shock, Vincent strikes Claude while everyone struggles to understand the revelation. After a brief pause, Elisabeth calls her mother and discovers the full truth of the matter. It is also revealed that Anna knew of this affair which further shocks everyone and raises the tension. In her frustration, Elisabeth confesses her long held resentments against her husband, brother and childhood friend. Vincent had always been the favorite child who was always forgiven. Claude had deeply betrayed her trust by not sharing his secret affair and she is furious with Pierre, having sacrificed her own academic career to support Pierre. In addition she feels as though he is not sharing their shared burden of parenthood and his hypocrisy is brought up once again. This leaves a quiet in the room as Anna and Elisabeth make their opinions clear. Anna is tired and disappointed with Vincent's childish and selfish behaviour, warning a divorce if he doesn't change his behaviour before accompanying Claude to see Françoise. Elisabeth tells Pierre that he will be in charge of cleaning up dinner, putting their children to bed and will be sleeping on the couch until further notice. This leaves Pierre and Vincent alone in the living room. They share a bottle of rose and joke around slightly to ease the tension still present. 4 months later, Pierre, Elisabeth, Claude and Françoise arrive to visit Vincent and Anna at the hospital to see their child, who is unexpectedly a daughter. Everyone is told that she will be named Françoise.

Eighth grader Kayla Day is in her final week at Miles Grove Middle School, a public middle school in a small New York town. She posts motivational vlogs on YouTube about confidence and self-image that receive few to no views. Timid and struggling to make friends at school, she is voted "Most Quiet" by her classmates. Meanwhile, her single father Mark struggles to connect with her and break her reliance on social media. Kayla is invited to popular classmate Kennedy's pool party by Kennedy's mother. At the party, she has a panic attack in the bathroom but eventually goes outside to swim, where she meets Kennedy's nerdy cousin Gabe. After trying to leave early, she has an awkward encounter with her crush Aiden, who encourages her to stay. She overcomes her anxiety and volunteers to partake in karaoke. After hearing that Aiden broke up with his last girlfriend because she refused to send him nude photos of herself, Kayla lies to Aiden and tells him that she has a folder of explicit photos of herself on her phone, piquing his interest. He asks if she gives blowjobs and she says yes, despite not knowing what he means. She later looks up instructions online and is disgusted by what she finds. During a high school shadow program, Kayla meets a friendly senior named Olivia who shows her around the school before exchanging phone numbers and inviting her to the mall with some friends. At the mall, Kayla is mortified to see her father spying on the group from afar and orders him to leave. While giving Kayla a ride home, Olivia's friend Riley initiates an awkward and invasive game of truth or dare, culminating in him removing his shirt and encouraging her to do the same. When she refuses, he becomes angry and claims he was just trying to help her gain some sexual experience. At home, Kayla breaks down and is comforted by Mark. She makes another vlog announcing that she intends to stop making videos, as she is not the confident person she pretends to be and feels unfit to give advice. She opens a time capsule she created for herself in sixth grade and watches a video in which her past self asks about her current friends and love life. After enlisting Mark's help in burning the time capsule, she asks him if she makes him sad. He tells her that she fills him with pride and could never make him sad, prompting her to hug him. Shortly before graduation, Kayla finally calls out Kennedy for acting indifferent and dismissive toward Kayla's attempts at befriending her. She later has dinner at Gabe's house and they enjoy their time together. Kayla makes a new time capsule that she and Mark bury in the backyard, and leaves a video message for her future high school senior self, encouraging her to persevere through tough times.

Xavier, a 24-year-old economics graduate student from Paris, attends the Erasmus Programme in Barcelona to further his career, against the wishes of his girlfriend Martine. On the flight, Xavier meets a married couple from France, a doctor named Jean-Michel and his wife Anne-Sophie. They invite him to stay in their home while he looks for somewhere to live. Xavier eventually finds a flatshare with students from England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany and Denmark. The roommates develop a companionship as they struggle with their different languages and cultures. Martine visits Xavier and returns disappointed when she realizes things are not the same. Xavier begins an affair with Anne-Sophie, using seduction tips learned from Isabelle, his lesbian roommate from Belgium. William arrives from England to visit his sister Wendy and creates tension with his abrasive manner and culturally insensitive comments. Xavier becomes depressed and hallucinates after Martine breaks up with him. He seeks Jean-Michel's advice, but he tells Xavier that his wife has confessed everything, and tells him to stop seeing her. Discord divides the roommates, but they come together to aid Wendy, who was nearly caught by her boyfriend Alistair in a sexual encounter with an American man. After saying goodbye to his new close friends, Xavier returns to Paris and gets his desired job at the ministry, but realizes that his experiences in Spain have changed him. He subsequently runs away on his first day on the job and pursues his dream to become a writer, recounting the story of his experiences in the Auberge Espagnole. Towards the end, Xavier can be seen getting together with his now ex-girlfriend Martine as well.

Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne are two good-hearted but dimwitted best friends and roommates living in Providence, Rhode Island. Lloyd, a chip-toothed limousine driver, is instantly smitten with his passenger Mary Swanson, who is flying to Aspen, Colorado. She leaves a briefcase in the airport and Lloyd attempts to return it, unaware it contains ransom money she has left for criminals Joe "Mental" Mentalino and J. P. Shay. Her plane has already departed, and Lloyd falls out of the jetway. Fired for leaving the scene of an accident, Lloyd returns home to learn that Harry, a dog groomer, has also been fired for showing up late to a dog show with the dogs covered in food. Mental and Shay follow Lloyd home, but he and Harry mistake the crooks for debt collectors and flee, returning later to find Harry's parakeet has been decapitated. Lloyd convinces Harry that they should return Mary's briefcase, and they set off for Aspen in Harry's dog-styled van. Mental poses as a hitchhiker and is picked up by Harry and Lloyd, who annoy him with their childish antics. Stopping for lunch, Mental plans to slip the duo rat poison pills, but they prank him by putting chili peppers in his burger, aggravating his stomach ulcer. Mistaking the pills for his medication, they inadvertently kill him with the poison but continue their trip. At a gas station, Harry flirts with fellow Aspen-bound driver Beth, and unwittingly saves Lloyd from being assaulted by Sea Bass, a trucker they tricked earlier. Police wait to intercept the duo on the road to Colorado, but Lloyd takes a wrong turn and drives all night through Nebraska. Harry gives up on the journey, but Lloyd persuades him to continue after trading their van for a minibike. The duo arrives in Aspen but cannot find Mary, and a frustrated Harry attacks Lloyd, breaking open the briefcase and discovering the money, which they use on a hotel suite and lavish spending spree. They read in the newspaper that Mary and her family are hosting a charity gala, where a nervous Lloyd asks Harry to talk to her on his behalf. However, Harry agrees to go skiing with Mary instead, lying to Lloyd that he arranged a date for him. While Harry and Mary have an enjoyable time together, Lloyd waits at the hotel bar and encounters Beth. Visiting Mary's home, he realizes that Harry lied to spend the day with her himself. In retaliation, Lloyd serves him coffee laced with laxatives, causing Harry to have diarrhea in Mary's broken toilet, while Lloyd reintroduces himself to Mary. Taking her to the hotel to return the briefcase, he confesses his love for her, but she rejects him. Nicholas Andre, a friend of the Swanson family, arrives, from whom Lloyd learns that Mary has a husband named Bobby, and that the money was for him, revealing himself as the mastermind behind the kidnapping. Nicholas holds them at gunpoint and is furious to discover that Harry and Lloyd spent the ransom, replacing it with IOUs. Harry arrives and after a brief confrontation with Lloyd over Mary is shot by Nicholas, and plays dead before ineptly returning fire. An FBI team bursts in, led by Beth, revealing that she's an agent on the kidnappers' case and prepared Harry with a bulletproof vest and gun. Nicholas and Shay are arrested, and Mary and Bobby are reunited, much to Lloyd's dismay. With their trip rendered pointless and their hopes for the trip crushed, Harry and Lloyd travel home on foot, after all their purchases were confiscated and their minibike broke down. They encounter a busload of bikini models on a national tour, but ignorantly reject an offer to be their "oil boys". Harry tells Lloyd that they will get their "break" one day, and they play a game of tag as they walk back to Rhode Island.

Taxi portrays director Jafar Panahi as he courses through the streets of Tehran while pretending to be a share taxi driver. He wants to hear a piece of his passengers' lives and declines any payment for the services. His earliest passengers include a conservative-minded man who supports capital punishment and a woman supporting its abolition, a pirated video vendor named Omid who once lent foreign films not available in the country to Panahi, an injured man and his wife who insist on recording a last will due to their panic, and a pair of superstitious old women wanting to release their goldfishes to a holy spring. Eventually, Panahi picks up his niece, Hana, at her school. She discusses film-making and wants Panahi's advice on creating a short film for a school project; her teacher has talked about several rules on creating films in Iran, including the avoidance of siahnamayi, or portraying a dark image about the country. However, Hana's teacher also stated that people should create films as they see fit. The two stop near a coffeehouse where Panahi meets with a family friend he has not seen for seven years. The latter inquires about a burglary he recently experienced and his dilemma of not informing the authorities about the thieves, whom he personally knows, as they are poor and have nothing else to lose. Meanwhile, Hana films a case of siahnamayi herself when she spots a boy who picks up money that had been dropped on the road by a couple of newlyweds and initially refuses to return it. Finally, Panahi and Hana meet with Nasrin Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer about to see the imprisoned Ghoncheh Ghavami and possibly convince her to give up her hunger strike. While adjusting her seat, Hana stumbles upon a purse belonging to one of the old women with the goldfishes. Sotoudeh decides to leave early so Panahi can deliver the purse, but not before giving him a rose as a goodwill for filmmakers. Panahi and Hana proceed to the springs and are able to return the purse; at the same time as this happens, a pair of thieves (or government agents) ransack the taxi, before the film cuts off.

In 1976 television presenter Tony Wilson sees the Sex Pistols perform at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall for the first time. Inspired, Wilson starts a weekly series of punk rock shows at a Manchester club, where the newly formed Joy Division perform, led by the erratic, brooding Ian Curtis. Wilson founds a record label, Factory Records, and signs Joy Division as the first band; the contract is written in Wilson's blood and gives the Factory artists full control over their music. He hires irascible producer Martin Hannett to record Joy Division, and soon the band and label have a hit record. In 1980, just before Joy Division is to tour the United States, Curtis hangs himself. Joy Division rename themselves New Order and record a hit single, " Blue Monday ". Wilson opens a nightclub, the Haçienda; business is slow at first, but eventually the club is packed each night. Wilson signs another hit band, Happy Mondays, led by Shaun Ryder, and the ecstasy -fuelled rave culture is born. Despite the apparent success, Factory Records is losing money. Every copy of "Blue Monday" sold loses five pence, as the intricate packaging by Peter Saville costs more than the single's sale price. Wilson pays for New Order to record a new album in Ibiza, but after two years, they still have not delivered a record. He pays for the Happy Mondays to record their fourth studio album in Barbados, but Ryder spends all the money on drugs. When Wilson finally receives the album, he finds that Ryder has refused to record vocals, and all the tracks are instrumentals. At the Haçienda, ecstasy use is curbing alcohol sales and attracting gang violence. The Factory partners try to save the business by selling the label to London Records. However, Wilson reveals that the Factory does not hold contracts with any of its artists and, therefore, does not own a catalogue of recordings. This renders the company ultimately worthless and the deal falls through. While smoking marijuana on the roof of Haçienda after its closing night, Wilson has a vision of God, who assures Wilson he has earned a place in history.