Living in Your Car

Steve Unger, a wealthy powerful CEO, falls from grace when he’s brought down on charges of fraud, obstruction of justice and racketeering. When Steve cuts a deal to get out of prison, he realizes that his old life no longer exists – his wife and daughter don’t want to live with him, his former colleagues shun him, and the whole world seems to despise him, even his parents refuse to help him and take him in. He visits his friend and lawyer Neil to retrieve his precious luxury sedan (to protect the car from creditors Neil has put it in his name). With nowhere else to turn, Steve meets Carol, a unique woman who has chosen to live in her car and who convinces Steve that his best bet while trying to get his life together is to do the same.

After spending his first night living in his car, Steve wakes up in an impound lot, his car having been towed while he slept in it. If he wants his car back he needs to raise $200 to cover the tow. To raise the money, Steve sneaks into his wife Lori’s house and steals it from his daughter Kate’s room. When Lori discovers what Steve has done, she is livid. To repay Kate, Steve takes a job as a day labourer, picking worms. But when he tries to negotiate a collective bargaining session on behalf of his worm picking colleagues, he gets them all fired. In retaliation, they attack Steve and damage his car.

Steve pays Karl, a possibly deranged local car dweller, to “fix his car”. To raise the money to fix his car (and to pay Kate back the money he owes her) Steve agrees to do errands for Neil’s mother. He sub-contracts all of his manual labour to Julio, one of his former, now un-employed worm picking colleagues, a decision that somehow leads Steve into a brief career as a porn star agent.

Steve’s latest effort to “get a foot back in the corporate world” finds him taking a job as a bike courier, delivering documents to his former colleagues, armed with a fast deteriorating designer suit and his un-diminished business acumen. When a fall in traffic lands Steve in the comfy confines of a hospital’s ER ward room, Steve realizes he’s found a good place to finally get some rest. While trying to convince the doctors to keep him around longer than necessary, he decides to help a possibly dying man change his will to keep his kids from inheriting his wealth.

Steve and Lori are told by Kate’s principal that their daughter has been caught running a sports-book on her high school’s intramural teams. Despite being proud of his daughter’s “entrepreneurial spirit”, Steve convinces the school’s janitor (who longs to produce and direct the semi-autobiographical teen slasher script he’s written) to give him access to the school’s records so Steve can destroy any evidence of Kate’s wrongdoings. Kate is annoyed by her mother’s new-found obsession with on-line dating. Steve visits Lori’s father, a once-shady businessman who is responsible for teaching Kate how to run a sports-book. Steve dispenses some ill-fated corporate advice to Scott, a twelve-year old kid who lives in a van near Steve’s car.

Exasperated by the perils of car-living, Steve moves into a rooming house where he meets an aging jazz singer who was once Steve’s favourite musician. A skeptical Steve agrees to help the musician reclaim her soul from the man she says she sold it to, who promised her “the blues skills of Robert Johnson” in exchange and delivered what appears to be a raw deal. While trying to prove to this woman that she never actually sold her soul, Steve is arrested for a break and entering.