Eli Mann yearns for an opportunity to quit his monotonous job as a coffee company newsletter writer. Making matters worse, his older sister bullies him, his elderly mother thinks little of him, and his girlfriend recently left him. A fork in the road appears when Eli meets a beautiful blonde woman, Inga Magnussen, a sales rep for a Danish wind power company. Inga and Eli discover they share the same progressive values, and soon become romantically involved. Eli’s good luck continues when an old high school friend, Turner Whitlock, asks him to research and write an expose about the senior U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, Tex Bullard, an extreme right-wing climate change denier who’s considering a run for president. Urged on by Inga and realizing that Bullard is dangerous person who could ruin the country if elected, Mann sets out on a surrealistic odyssey that takes him from Malibu to Aspen, and places in between. Alternately comical and sad, The Mermaid exposes the character of one man, as well as the dark underside of the America we currently live in.