Four schoolboy friends Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Henry (Thomas Jane), Pete (Tim Olyphant) and Beaver (Jason Lee), rescue a unimportant retarded schoolboy from bullies, and later discover they have a strange new aptitude of communal rational telepathy. Twenty years later, while on one of their annual winter log cabin reunions, they help a unsalvageable stranger struggling through the snow. But the foreigner brings within him an awesome secret which threatens not only the four friends but the express planet.