A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind and water. It is cold enough to crack stones, and, when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the warmer south, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing: just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless cannibalistic bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a rusting shopping cart of scavenged food--and each other.

With an absent father and a withdrawn and depressed mother, 17 year-old Ree Dolly keeps her family together in a dirt poor rural area. She's taken aback however when the local Sheriff tells her that her father put up their house as collateral for his bail and unless he shows up for his trial in a week's time, they will lose it all. She knows her father is involved in the local drug trade and manufactures crystal meth, but everywhere she goes the message is the same: stay out of it and stop poking your nose in other people's business. She refuses to listen, even after her father's brother, Teardrop, tells her he's probably been killed. She pushes on, putting her own life in danger, for the sake of her family until the truth, or enough of it, is revealed.

In Montgomery County, Kelly Taylor is ready to go to college and takes her autistic brother, Tom, to a specialized institution. However, the bank informs her that she does not have sufficient funds in her account to honor her check. Her stepfather, Johnny Gaveneau, withdrew the money from her account the day before. When Kelly arrives home, Johnny reveals that he used the money to buy a tiger for his 'safari show' project. In addition he has the house reinforced, in order to protect it from hurricanes, so all the windows and external doors are covered with wood. When Kelly awakes, she finds that the starving tiger is inside the house and Tom and she are trapped with the ravenous animal.

While being transported by two detectives in a car, the dangerous criminal Krug is rescued by his brother Francis and his girlfriend Sadie, and they brutally kill the detectives. Meanwhile Emma, her husband Dr. John and their seventeen year-old daughter Mari Collingwood head on vacation to their house nearby the lake. Mari borrows the family car to meet her friend Paige that is working in a store in the town. They befriend the teenager Justin in the store and he offers some marijuana to the pothead Paige in the motel where he is lodged. While they are smoking grass in Justin's room, Krug, who is Justin's father, Francis and Sadie arrive and abduct the girls. Krug drives Mari's car and she provokes a crash on a tree. Krug stabs Paige and rapes Mari; however Mari manages to escape, swimming in the lake, but Krug shoots her in the back. They walk through the isolated road in the woods and they reach Collingwood's house telling that they have just had a car accident...

The last months of Jesse James's life, from meeting Robert Ford, a 19-year-old who idolizes Jesse, to the day Ford shoots him. Jesse's a wanted man, living under a pseudonym, carrying out a train robbery, disappearing to Kentucky, and reappearing to plan a bank holdup with Robert and Robert's brother as his team. The rest of the gang is dead, arrested, or gone from Missouri. Whenever Jesse's around, there's tension: he's murderous, quixotic, depressed, and cautious. Ford wants to be somebody and wants the reward. On April 3, 1882, things come to a head: Jesse is 34, Robert 20. Ford becomes famous, reenacting the shooting on stage, facing down the label "coward," shot dead in 1892.

In rural Texas, welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss discovers the remains of several drug runners who have all killed each other in an exchange gone violently wrong. Rather than report the discovery to the police, Moss decides to simply take the two million dollars present for himself. This puts the psychopathic killer, Anton Chigurh, on his trail as he dispassionately murders nearly every rival, bystander and even employer in his pursuit of his quarry and the money. As Moss desperately attempts to keep one step ahead, the blood from this hunt begins to flow behind him with relentlessly growing intensity as Chigurh closes in. Meanwhile, the laconic Sherrif Ed Tom Bell blithely oversees the investigation even as he struggles to face the sheer enormity of the crimes he is attempting to thwart.