The son of dust-bowl migrants to Southern California, Eddie Burnett comes of age in the post-war suburbs, freefalling through the turbulence of the sixties and early seventies. The transformation from a boy's innocence to a man's hardened wariness is captured in lyrical, emotionally raw episodes, in this gut-wrenching look at the nature of violence and dysfunction, with a hymn to the tenacity of hope, belief and conviction.