In the spirit of Preston Sturges’s send-ups of American institutions and values, Demme’s finely detailed, quirky comedy recounts the story of a working man (LeMat) who gives a derelict Howard Hughes (brilliantly played by Robards) a lift in the-middle-of-nowhere Nevada. Melvin Dummar is a loser straight out of a country-western lyric, whose wife (Steenburgen) has dumped him and who in Bo Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplay seems incapable of ever outdistancing the bad luck that hounds him. Then out of the blue (and eight years later), Melvin becomes the heir to Hughes’s "Mormon will" and the cool $156,000,000 that the reclusive multi-millionaire has left him.