Two young lovers learn that a small group of child-like space aliens are marooned on Earth and are being held prisoner at a top secret military facility. The couple then decide to liberate the extraterrestrial castaways and help them make a rendezvous with a rescue ship sent from the alien home planet.

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

Jack Slade was born during a solar eclipse in the year 1980. 18 years later, he finds out he has the ability to travel into the future. He projects himself into the year 2035, where society has been destroyed by a fascist regiment of psychopathic doctors that rule the wastelands, creating deformed mutants with a serum synthesized from the flesh of dead aliens. Now Slade must travel back to the year 1998 to destroy a device known as the wavelength generator, which opened the dimensional gateways to these alien beings. With the help of an army of female outlaws and a sleazy detective, Slade re-connects with the star child Khadijah, who holds the key to stopping these tragic events from ever taking place.