This film is based on a true-to-life story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), an actual student-athlete at Emory University, as told by his sympathetic sister Carine (Jena Malone). In response to his materialistic, manipulative, and domineering parents Billie & Walt (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt, respectively), McCandless destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donates $24,000 (nearly his entire savings) to Oxfam, and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well-used but reliable economy car towards his ultimate goal: to live alone and off the land in Alaska. Along the way, leaves his automobile in the course of a flash flood, to hitchhike his way there after burning the remainder of his dwindling cash supply. Taking an unintentionally circuitous route, he encounters Rainey (Brian H. Dierker) & Jan Burres (Catherine Keener), Wayne Weterberg (Vince Vaughn), Tracy Tatro (Kristen Stewart), Kevin (Zach Galifianakis), Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook) and many other unconventional individuals on his itinerary as he purposefully trudges onward to his final destination, arriving in the wilds of Alaska nearly two years after his initial departure. He starts living in a "Magic Bus" serving as a shelter for people walking in the area (though in the film there is nobody else). Resourceful, McCandless finds joy in living off the land, and begins to write a book of his adventures. Unfortunately, as the spring thaw arrives, he is cut off from civilization by waterways. As his food supply lessens, he resorts to eating plants. Although he consults a brought-along book about the edibility of plants, he confuses an edible and a poisonous kind, which weakens him. While he survives the poison, he is unable to find animals to hunt and he slowly starves to death. As he dies, he continues to write, detailing his painful demise as a dramatic denouement to his autobiography.
