Names are not formally given, and the hospital is only mentioned once as "Metropolitan" by a doctor on a phone call.
The patients come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and social classes, but most are poor and marginalized.
Among the patients are a man who fears he has cancer, a neglected toddler who fell out a window, an art student who ingested an unknown drug and is suffering a bad trip, a queer teenager trying to obtain welfare, and an elderly woman who has a pulmonary embolism and is in critical condition.
A group of patients attending Catholic mass serves as the closing sequence.
In 1994, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".