People Like Us

New York based Sam Harper--a "salesman" who works for Allied Barter Trade, which deals solely in bartering overstocked goods and does not pay corporate taxes with no money trading hands--does everything but come right out and say that he does not want to attend his father's funeral in Los Angeles. He didn't much like his father, Jerry Harper, a music-business executive from whom he felt distant for most of his life. By association, he has a strained relationship with his mother, Lillian Harper, for purposefully staying out of her and Jerry's lives, being collateral damage in Jerry and Sam's estrangement. Sam's supportive girlfriend Hannah is able to get him onto a plane to Los Angeles. Sam learns from Ike Rafferty, the family's lawyer, that Jerry has a post-mortem task for him: to deliver a shaving kit filled with $150,000 cash to Josh Davis. He then learns that 11-year-old Josh, a smart-aleck boy prone to acting out, is the son of single working mom and recovering alcoholic Frankie Davis--the half-sister (i.e. Jerry's illegitimate daughter) he never knew he had, although Frankie knew that Jerry was her father--who had dropped out of her life when she was a child. With all this knowledge at hand, Jerry contemplates whether to hand the money over to Frankie and Josh, especially as he is facing not only money but legal issues back in New York stemming from a barter situation gone bad, let alone if he will introduce himself to her as her half-brother and try to be part of her and Josh's lives.