The mean and desolate streets of Brooklyn are home to a host of unhappy, hopeless characters stuck in dead-end lives. A young prostitute, emotionally numb from having sold her body so many times, regularly leads her prospective clients to a dark alley where a gang beats and robs them; an office worker cannot deal with his repressed homosexuality; and a young girl's father refuses to admit that she is eight months pregnant.

All these stories take place in a world waiting to explode: local workers are engaged in an angry strike against a nearby factory, while, not too far away at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, soldiers sail daily for Korea, many never to return.

The personal and the political intermingle in this bleak look at poverty, drugs and violence in the inner-city in the early 1950s, based on Hubert Selby Jr.'s controversial book.

Jennifer Jason Leigh received the Best Supporting Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle in 1990 for her work in this film.