An idealistic girl, Patsy Newquist, saves a young apathetic photographer, Alfred Chamberlain, from a gang of hooligans. She falls for him, but he turns out to be a nihilist. They go out anyway. All this happens against the background of random shootings in NYC (at the time the play the movie is based on was written, the city was going broke). Her family accept him, but when she tries to change him and get him to find meaning in life, things go horribly wrong in a cruel twist of fate.—John Vogel
Pitch black comedy about a young nihilistic New Yorker coping with pervasive urban violence, obscene phone calls, rusty water pipes, electrical blackouts, paranoia and ethnic-racial conflict during a typical summer of the 1970s.