Starring Andie MacDowell and Bill Pullman, Wender’s nineteenth feature film is set in Los Angeles and portrays a group of characters from all social backgrounds whose lives are connected by violence in unusual ways: a film producer, an actress, a scientist, an FBI agent, a stunt woman, a policeman, a Mexican gardener and his family, a cleaning woman and her daughter, and many others. Wenders says that the movie is about violence, but is not a violent movie: "We didn’t want violence to be part of the film’s language." Instead the film tries to show the seductiveness and paradoxical nature of violence without ever displaying it. All the characters are profoundly affected by violence, but the violence happens before or after the episodes shown in the film.

Mike Meltzer (Bill Pullman) is an enormously successful producer of violent Hollywood movies. His wife (Andie MacDowell) is on the verge of leaving him to go and live in Guatemala and do good works. When Meltzer’s life becomes dangerously entangled with that of Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne), a computer programmer who has created an advanced surveillance system for the FBI, he is forced to go underground, together with the family of his Mexican gardener.