White Irish Drinkers

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It's early autumn of 1975 in Brooklyn and 18-year-old Brian Leary (Nick Thurston) is killing time, pulling off petty crimes with his street tough older brother Danny (Geoff Wigdor), whom he both idolizes and fears. He doesn't really want to be a criminal, but he doesn't share the dreams of his old friends from their working class neighborhood either. They all yearn for the culturally approved 9-to-5 Civil Service jobs with benefit packages that will carry them through weekends of beer into lazy retirement. Brian doesn't want to end up in a soul-numbing job like his buddies, but he's sure he doesn't want to be like his best friend Todd (Zachary Booth) either. Todd has betrayed their blue-collar roots by accepting a scholarship to college. But Brian has a secret -- he's a talented artist. In the basement of the bagel shop beneath his parent's apartment, he creates impressionistic charcoal and watercolor images of the stifling city that surrounds him. When he puts on his headphones and paints, shouting matches between Brian's longshoreman father Paddy (Stephen Lang) and world-weary mother (Karen Allen) fade into the distance. But even his private world can't block out the brutal beatings a drunken Paddy inflicts on Danny. Though Paddy has never been physically abusive to Brian, every time he sees his brother's suffering, his heart breaks a little more. Besides his art, Brian finds respite in working for Whitey (Peter Riegert), a kindly curmudgeon who runs the failing Lafayette movie theater in Bay Ridge. Brian's been helping Whitey pay his debts to local mobster Jimmy Cheeks (Ken Jennings) by bringing in rock groups to play gigs at the theater. With money problems mounting, Whitey decides to call in a lifelong favor from an old friend, now the tour manager of the Rolling Stones. The Stones will stop to play the Lafayette for one hour only on their way to Madison Square Garden...a plan Whitey hopes will solve his loan shark problems forever. The small Brooklyn neighborhood buzzes with anticipation of the Stones' arrival, which gives Brian the courage to talk to pretty Shauna Friel (Leslie Murphy), the girl he was too shy to approach in high school. Shauna, a travel agent, is awaiting transfer to a glamorous new job in Los Angeles, and dreams of traveling the world before she's 25. She and one of Brian's other friends, the college-bound Todd, begin to plant new seeds of hope in Brian's doubtful mind. Perhaps his art could be a ticket for him out of his dead end life and into a future of possibilities. When one excessively violent beating from Paddy convinces Danny he can't stay at home anymore, he tries to enlist Brian in one last scheme - to rob the Lafayette on the night of the Rolling Stones concert. Danny sees this as their only chance to get enough money to skip town and start them both off in a new life, somewhere far away from Brooklyn. As the theater fills with revelers, Brian is torn between his love and loyalty to Danny and his real fondness for Whitey. In the twists and turns that follow, both brothers must reexamine their dreams, and make decisions that will change their lives forever.