[2] When his mother suffers a nervous breakdown and ultimately dies by suicide, he is left in the care of his father, an emotionally distant and ill-tempered alcoholic.

Francie spends most of his time with his best friend Joe Purcell talking about "gangsters, cowboys and Indians, comic-book monsters and the early-1960s threat of nuclear annihilation.

"[3] However, when Francie's growing conflict with another boy, Phillip Nugent, and his mother begins to go too far, he ends up at reform school.

Faced with being left completely alone in the world, Francie loses his grip on reality and lashes out with uncontrollable brutality, which shocks his provincial hometown.

With no previous filming experiences, Eamonn Owens and Alan Boyle (who played Francie's best friend, Joe) were found at the local school in Killeshandra in County Cavan where casting assistant Maureen Hughes went to visit her uncle.

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon Entertainment criticizes Jordan and McCabe for an occasional "flavor of an after-school special purveying didactic lessons about abuse and victimization," and losing "the novel's Beckettian ambiguity."

[5] The site's critics consensus reads, "Equal parts comical and harrowing, The Butcher Boy is a sobering tale of abuse told with an imaginative lyricism that is by turns inspired and distracting.

"[3] Andrew O'Hehir of Salon said, "Neil Jordan's sweetly tragicomic movie" has "elaborate fantasy sequences [that] feel like irrelevant amusements."

"[5] Owens received widespread acclaim for his performance; he was awarded a Special Mention at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998.