Four teenage friends - Frank, Spüli, Mücke, and Pommes - try to have their first contact with the opposite gender. Not so easy in the Ruhr region of the 80s. Attempts at dancing and being in a band go wrong, and their parents and teachers can't help with that, so the four teens need to get creative.

Julian is a 12-year-old boy whose family is just scraping by in the Ruhr industrial region of Germany in the early 1960s . When his mother and younger sister go away for a while, he is left mostly alone in the apartment while his father works in the coal mine. He has to confront the confusing world of adults and older boys and the older girl next door on his own. Finally events build up and threaten to tear the family apart.