Reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, teenage Billie travels over the rainbow and under tangled concrete overpasses, from her native Austin, Texas to the improbably named Liberal, Kansas. Her plan is to live with her godfather, Adam, "a lonely, gay, film geek stuck inside a jock's body - a jock's world." His partner Steven run the Starlite, a movie theater and safe haven for their eccentricities and artistic yearnings. Together, they face new challenges as they help a grieving teen find the path to her true self, while the couple themselves live with the compromises they've made for the sake of comfort.
Liberal, the adopted home of Oz's Dorothy, is also home to small-town intolerance, immature adults with unsettled scores, and their children, some who resist and others who succumb to their parents' prejudices. Along the way Billie meets Clara -- a goth, lesbian Dorothy impersonator who's used to being an outsider -- and Dylan -- who finds himself caught between his old allegiance to rigid cliques and his magnetic attraction to this new girl who rocks Frida Kahlo tees and cowboy boots.
