Jason Staebler lives on the Boardwalk and fronts for the local mob in Atlantic City. He is a dreamer who asks his brother David, a radio personality from Philadelphia, to help him build a paradise on a Pacific Island, which might be just another of his pie-in-the-sky schemes. Inevitably, complications begin to pile up.

During a session with his psychoanalyst, Alexander Portnoy rants about everything that is bothering him. His complaints include his childhood and his family with an emphasis on his mother, his sexual fantasies and the problems that he has with women, and his obsessive feelings about his Judaism.