The film stars Gena Rowlands, Richard Crenna, Lea Thompson, Justin Deas, Elizabeth Berridge and Darren Dalton.
When a large coal company offers to buy their land to open a strip mine, it causes controversy in the family and the community over the future of development.
"[4] The historian Ryan Driskell Tate has noted that the "screenplay experiments with themes central to McMurtry’s later works: the clash between romantic and realistic frontiers, between white men reared on the myths of cowboy hereos and the new class of tycoons who upend their existence.
The historian Ryan Driskell Tate writes: The film's fixation on technology provides a central metaphor in this world where men feel emasculated and inadequate in modern industrial society.
The freedom from machines and big technologies restores their humanity... By contrast, the new coal miners embrace mechanized existence as a sturdy tool for violence and domination (over nature, over women, over anachronistic ranchers, over each other).