It stars Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Katharina Thalbach, Daniel Olbrychski, and Charles Aznavour, with David Bennent in the lead role of Oskar Matzerath, a young boy who willfully arrests his own physical development and remains in the body of a child even as he enters adulthood.

A darkly comic war drama with magical realist elements, the film follows Oskar, a precocious child living in Danzig, who wields seemingly preternatural abilities.

He lives in contempt of the adults around him and witnesses firsthand their potential for cruelty, first via the rise of the Nazi Party and then the subsequent war.

[5] The film centers on Oskar Matzerath, a boy born and raised in the Free City of Danzig prior to and during World War II, who recalls the story's events as an unreliable narrator.

Oskar is the son of a half-Polish Kashubian woman, Agnes Bronski, who is married to a German chef named Alfred Matzerath.

Flashbacks reveal Agnes' conception by Joseph Kolaizcek, a petty criminal in rural Kashubia (located in modern-day Poland).

Reflecting on the foolish antics of his drunken parents and friends, he resolves to stop growing and throws himself down the cellar stairs.

During a visit to the circus, Oskar befriends Bebra, a performing dwarf who chose to stop growing at age ten.

When Alfred, Agnes, Jan, and Oskar are on an outing to the beach, they see an eel-picker collecting eels from a horse's head used as bait.

At the funeral, Oskar encounters Sigismund Markus, the kindly Jewish toy seller who supplies him with replacement drums, and who was also in love with Agnes.

They gang-rape Lina, and Alfred is killed by a soldier after he swallows and chokes violently on his Nazi party pin, apparently betrayed by Oskar.

David Bennent was discovered for the role of Oskar after Schlöndorff discussed with a doctor which illnesses might cause a child to stop growing at an early age, and the doctor brought up the case of the son of actor Heinz Bennent, surprising Schlöndorff, who knew and had worked with Heinz, but did not know about David's condition.

[4] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film two stars out of four, writing: "I must confess that the symbolism of the drum failed to involve me."

He continued: And here we are at the central problem of the movie: Should I, as a member of the audience, decide to take the drum as, say, a child's toy protest against the marching cadences of the German armies?

"[9] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film "will be hard to beat as the season's most prestigious bad idea for a movie," stating that Oskar "doesn't have a personality forceful enough to unify the rambling continuity or replace the narrative voice and complex of meanings that gave the book intellectual vitality and authority.

"[10] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film a full four stars out of four and called it "quite shattering", with "one striking image after another.

"[11] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times declared that it was "like few films since Citizen Kane—a combination of stunning logistics and technique and of humanistic content that is terrifically affecting.

Michael Camfield, at the time a member of the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit against the police department on July 4, 1997, alleging that the tape had been illegally confiscated and his rights infringed.

[26][27] There ensued a high-profile series of hearings on the film's merits as a whole versus the controversial scenes, and the role of the judge as censor.

This incident is covered in the documentary film Banned in Oklahoma, which is included in the 2004 Criterion Collection DVD release of The Tin Drum.