As he navigates his new existence and tries to make amends for his past mistakes, Socrates also forms and maintains relationships with a variety of different characters, including other ex-cons, local business owners and others from the rough neighborhood.

He helps Darryl throughout the story and also has to deal with being discriminated against by the management at a local supermarket while looking for steady work, seeing a good woman be treated unfairly and his best friend's deteriorating health.

"[1] Renowned writer John Leonard delivered this full-length review for New York Magazine that summarizes the action and analyzes the characters and symbols contained within the movie: "When we first meet Socrates Fortlow, he’s pushing a shopping cart through South Central Los Angeles, which looks something like Beirut after the latest holy war, collecting bottles and cans to redeem at the local supermarket, where he’d really rather box groceries.

He is also a nineties incarnation of Easy Rawlins, the fifties fixer who solves cases, saves children, and buys buildings in Walter Mosley’s series of mysteries about Watts.

In the collection of related short stories that Mosley himself has adapted for this cable-television movie, Socrates will likewise save a child, and that marriage, and maybe even a broken neighborhood, besides easing the exit of Cobbs with morphine and fixing himself like a table.

"[2] In a 2021 RogerEbert.com tribute article to director Michael Apted, Matt Zoller Seitz writes "The HBO film Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, adapted by Walter Moseley from his collection of intertwined short stories, had a hardboiled crime-novel wrapping, but inside was an observant and often tender portrait of working Black America, with vivid and eccentric characters rarely seen on TV or in movies.