Ode to Billy Joe

“What the song didn't tell you, the movie will.”

Bobbie Lee Hartley (Glynnis O'Connor) is a teenager in 1950s Mississippi who wants a love of her own, and the only boy who seems to be looking back is Billy Joe McAllister (Robby Benson). Max Baer Jr. takes the song's story and sets it in the heat of one Delta summer, among her family's dinner table and the people who know everyone's business. The two of them keep drawing closer, and the tragedy waiting ahead puts everything they feel at risk.