It stars Noah Fleiss, Val Kilmer, Karen Young, Ethan Hawke, John Leguizamo, Austin Pendleton, Camryn Manheim, Max Ligosh, and James Costa.
His father, Bob, is a raging, violent alcoholic, while his mother, Theresa, feels too stressed to pay attention to him and lives in fear of getting caught in the path of her husband's wrath.
Throughout the movie, Joe is seen engaging in petty theft (shoplifting from stores, breaking into cars to lift items inside, and stealing from mailboxes) to raise money to pay off Bob's debts and replace Theresa's records.
This reaches its climax when, one night, nearing the end of his shift, Joe learns from Jorge, who decides to leave early, that two of his bosses (a couple: Jerry and Mary) living in the apartment directly above the diner have already left and are gone for the weekend.
After his shift, he sneaks in through an upstairs window and ransacks the apartment, looking for a locked metal box that was previously revealed to contain a large quantity of cash.
Though injured, he manages to escape before another one of his bosses, an older man named Roy, who is drunkenly making his way back to the apartment to retrieve his house keys, is able to catch him.
Using the stolen money, Joe buys brand new copies of Theresa's records that were destroyed by Bob and stores them in a space beneath his house with an enveloped note for his mother.
[4] Leguizamo, who was also the executive producer, filmed his scenes for three days between Staten Island and the Broadway theater where his one-man show Freak was being staged.