The film opens with Suzette, a far-from-typical bartender on the modern-day Sunset Strip in Hollywood. "She’s a pot stirrer...definitely." Hawn says of her character. "I kind of look at her like a Molotov Cocktail. Throw her in anything and watch what happens, because it’s a lot of fun." Suzette has been bartending on this legendary street longer than most of the bar’s customers have been alive. "She’s living in the past, and she thinks that she’s not as old as she is...that she can still land the rock stars," Hawn says. It was a fine line to "figure out a way to create the character that people would like to be like, but not become."
"These women pretty much had every rock star known to man," Hawn laughs. In the story, Suzette fished The Doors’ Jim Morrison out of the bar’s bathroom after he passed out there...underneath her - but that was many years ago. Suzette refuses to see that the world around her has changed - the customers are young, the bands are full of angst, and the kid she works for has had enough of her attitude and her penchant for telling it like it is, or was. "Her life hasn’t amounted to anything in terms of material substance or relationships. At the beginning of the movie, she bottoms out by’ losing her job, being humiliated and out of money," Dolman describes.
In an attempt to find a piece of herself that she lost a long time ago, or at least to get some cash to pay her rent, Suzette sets off on the ominous journey to Phoenix to find her old friend Vinnie (Susan Sarandon), the other half of THE BANGER SISTERS.
Sarandon reflects on her character. "At some point, Lavinia got tired of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and moved on. The only way she could find to do that was just to denounce the entire past and set herself up with a new identity’. Her family doesn’t know that she had this crazy past. She’s married to a lawyer, and she has these two girls that she’s quite strict with, because God forbid they should do any of the things that she did." When Suzette walks back into her life, Lavinia is "just terrified that my whole facade and new identity will be shattered, because basically I don’t know that my family would accept me if they knew my past, or that I could even accept myself if I knew my past. So I’ve gone out of my way to create a whole new kind of anal, boring but safe, very under control, hopefully funny, version of a whole new lifestyle."
On the road to find Lavinia, Suzette, who is in need of cash to fill her gas tank, meets Harry, played by Geoffrey Rush. The unlikeliest of characters to emerge from a nearby bus that has just stopped to refuel, he proves to be Suzette’s only salvation. But he’s not content to just fork over the cash. Harry will join Suzette on the trek to Phoenix, if for no other reason than escaping the germ-ridden cesspool in which he has been traveling.
"He’s quite obsessive-compulsive and has a very carefully delineated lifestyle." Rush explains of the character he plays. "He has basically shut down any of his natural impulses, so being around a vibrant ex-groupie who lives life to the fullest and is very comfortable in her own skin...that has a big impact on him." Dolman said Rush delivers an effortless performance "as a man who has repressed all his physicality...a writer caught in his own intellect and underneath this is this volcano that’s waiting to explode."
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