This short film was packaged on video with Hartley's featurette "Surviving Desire." It affectionately examines the lives of a group of "young, middle-class, white, college-educated, unskilled, broke, drunk" Brooklynites who would love to make something of their lives -- assuming they can pay the rent first.

Karl has a childlike innocence and naive purity. In spite of making false friends and enemies, he retains his decency in New York which remains a foreign city for him.