It's 1960. In a small logging town called Calamus that's about as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get, Wade Curren, star of the high school baseball and football teams, is content living out his role of local hero, holding court in the corner booth of the town diner where his girlfriend Lorna waits tables.

Lorna, working to support her family, is plotting her escape from their small town. Fiercely independent and an avid reader of the kinds of books that aren't taught in school, Lorna wants a bigger life. She tries to show Wade that Calamus is a trap, that as an individual...