Vladimir Girshkin has conflicting tendencies toward agitprop and photo-ops and all the stops between, from Marxism to socialism - and especially now to capitalism, with this latter ism to the nth and cranked to eleven, the level of skewed assimilation and ugly-American hard-sell hucksterism. To compound his freely enterprising restlessness, this 25-year-old Russian immigrant, "part P.T. Barnum, part V.I. Lenin," thinks he may be ready for a "better home in which to be unhappy."
Not that he's in any hurry to get there, and not that he's dissatisfied with the early-90s slacker-ama New York social life among pretentious trendaholics and the nattering nabobs of academia. Nor is Vladimir completely discontented in his relationship with his parents, each of whom has claimed a quick stake in the promised land - his mother as a successful fear-mongering entrepreneur, and his father as a Medicare-defrauding quack.
Vladimir isn't even that unhappy with his lowly American dream-on clerk job aiding - and abetting, in all its unscrupulous connotations - newer immigrants at the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society, a job he took after dropping out of an expensive and progressive Midwestern university replete with "worker's solidarity festivals" and a "massive spring-break sexual-identity crisis."
But because Vladimir is tired of living vicariously through his delusions, he grabs a little grandeur in the form of a high-living, high-maintenance girlfriend, and goes in on an ill-advised get-rich-quick scheme. In the process, he also grabs a little unwanted attention in a Florida hotel room from a crime lord who turns out to have his own sexual-identity crisis, and who turns out to have his own fleet of peach-colored Cadillacs manned with armed henchmen seeking revenge on the in-over-his-head upstart who would spurn their boss' advances.
The thugs chase this "unlikely Yankee Doodle" all the way back to New York, and force further travel plans to the East European cultural capital Prava in the fictional Republika Stolovaya, which has become, after the collapse of communism, a hotbed of disaffected American youth and international crime.
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