Woody Harrelson stars as a small-town journalist on his way to a promising career when he refuses to kill a story on a horseracing racket. Subsequently set up to take the fall, he goes to prison. Two years later, a free man again, he reluctantly returns home to Palmetto, where he soon finds himself embroiled in a shady scheme involving a mysterious femme fatale (Elisabeth Shue) and the phony kidnapping of the daughter of one of the town's wealthiest citizens.