David Lamb is a 47-year-old Chicago businessman. His marriage is falling apart, his wife has thrown him out, and he has just buried his father. One afternoon, he is sitting and smoking in a car park, when an 11-year-old girl named Tommie asks him for a cigarette, trying to impress her older friends. This chance meeting sparks a peculiar mutual preoccupation. In an attempt to improve Tommie’s dismal prospects, at least temporarily, David decides to show her the great outdoors. They both know that their long journey spent together will change their innocent friendship for good. The film’s protagonist, played by its director and screenwriter Ross Partridge, is imagined through a sequence of incredibly precisely timed individual acts with a focus on behavioural detail. The audience feels his pain, while still never completely trusting him. Lamb is deeply disturbing, at times enigmatic, even shocking, but at the same time magical and profoundly emotional. A fairy tale for adults of the post-industrial age.