A crime story that detours into family drama, Simple Men focuses on two brothers—a double-crossed armed robber (Burke) and a young, bookish college student (Sage)—who are reunited in a quest to find their long-lost father. In search of the infamous "radical shortstop," a baseball star-turned-anarchist who may have bombed the Pentagon in the 1960s, their underfinanced journey takes them through the hamlets of Long Island and into glancing contact with a lovelorn sheriff, a furtively smoking nun, and a guitar-playing gas station attendant. En route to this unlikely reunion, the older brother utters the now-classic Hartley line, "There’s no such thing as adventure or love, only trouble and desire."