Frankie does an act as The Mighty Bozo, a character who sits in a dunk tank insulting the crowd, while Patch takes the money and runs the game.

At one stand, Donna, an independent 18-year-old bored with small-town life, strikes up a friendship with Frankie and at his invitation follows the carny onto the carnival circuit.

Upset at losing their money, the local underworld's muscle boys wreck the Bozo Joint and kill On-Your-Mark, a carny who has been "with it" for more than fifty years and was planning to retire at the end of the season.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two stars out of four and wrote, "Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals than it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it.

"[4] Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film had "nice performances" but was "not cohesive as it might be," because the filmmakers "appear to be unable to resist the colorful or bizarre material that leads nowhere.

"[5] Variety declared, "An excitingly eccentric, nervously energetic work, 'Carny' is an intriguing look at an infrequently examined American subculture which emerges as more impressive in its various, sometimes brilliant parts than as a satisfying whole.

"[6] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times praised the "excellence of the acting" but thought the film ended "in a quite unsatisfactory way that leaves virtually nothing resolved and everyone compromised.

"[8] Reviewing the film 30 years later, Dennis Swartz said, "The ambiance turns out to be much richer than the narrative, in this still intriguing misanthropic pic (freaks and outsiders against the ugly conventional world) that revels in the pleasure one gets in hustling someone at their con game.