A reporter becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign that drives him to the point of suicide after he exposes the CIA's role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and importing cocaine into California. Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb.

Fifteen-year-old Howie loses just about everything and everyone in the space of a single week, but ends up finding himself in the process. His mother has just died. His father, a building contractor, can barely keep tabs on his young girlfriend, let alone his own son. Thusly, the teen must navigate his adolescence virtually unsupervised. Floating towards an ill-behaved existence, Howie and his crowd begin robbing houses in the middle-class neighborhoods off the Long Island Expressway. Together, he and his best friend Gary break into a place belonging to an old guy named Big John, a local man who is a respected pillar of the community. When Big John fingers Gary for the crime, Howie learns that his pal has been leading a secret, dangerous but also alluring double life. Subsequently, we also discover that Big John has secrets of his own.

In Providence, a husband and wife die in a botched robbery; we see flickers of his last memories. His heart goes to Terry Bernard, a single father raising a girl with a rare degenerative disease. After the operation, Terry has flashes of memory from the last moments of the dead donor's life. Then, he recognizes one of the donor's killers and follows him into an alley. Within days, Terry becomes an unwilling avenger, with a police detective on his trail. Meanwhile, he begins a romance with his daughter's doctor, his moods complicated by memory flashes, the donor's deepening presence in both Terry's mind and body, and the unexplained bond among the donor's killers. Can this end well?

For over 20 years, Jimmy Testagross has lived his childhood dream: being a roadie for his childhood heroes, Blue Oyster Cult. But the band's Arena-Rock glory days are a distant memory. County fairs and club gigs pay the bills. And Jimmy has become a casualty of these leaner times. With no place to go, no job prospects, and no real skills outside of being a roadie, Jimmy needs to regroup. So he returns to his childhood home in Queens, Ny. There, he revisits old relationships: his ailing, widower mom, a high school crush, a former nemesis and, most importantly, his relationship with himself. Jimmy, the middle-aged man-child, has never grown up. He still carries the resentments and frustrations of his youth, and has allowed them to fester and define who and what he is. Confronted with his mother's illness, Jimmy has a choice: let go of the past and take responsibility for both himself and the woman who raised and now needs him. Or continue to live a life of lies and frustration.