A 12-year-old boy comes of age in 1969 Key West against the backdrop of the Apollo moon landing, when he begins to sell cocaine so his mother can stop stripping.
Set in 1969, a twelve-year-old grows up in Key West with his mother, who is paying the bills by stripping at the local topless bar. The boy finds out about her activities and tries to convince her to stop, to no avail. A local restaurant owner hires him to collect fish from a boat out in the bay, and the boy discovers that the restaurant owner is using the fish to bring drugs in to shore. He steals one load and goes about selling it so his mother can afford to quit her job.—Ed Sutton <[email protected]>
After being decommissioned, Lt. John Cross with the US Navy, he a bomber pilot during the Vietnam War, moved his family from Texas to Key West, Florida. A specific event in the war left him scarred emotionally, and as such abandoned the family in Key West to live in a monastery in order to cleanse his soul. It's now the summer of 1969. Life for his wife, Tracy Cross, and their now twelve year old son, Chris Cross, largely revolves around the Eden Hotel where they live and where Tracy works waiting tables during the day, that job which reduces their rent. Tracy's dream is to save enough money to buy a house to be able to move from the hotel. Chris, who loves and misses his father and still expects him to come home one day, wants to do whatever he can to achieve this dream by working a series of odd jobs himself, although Tracy tells him that the money he earns is his and his alone. Without telling Chris, Tracy, much against the abhorrent thought of it, accepts the job to replace departing Monica, one of the strippers where she tends bar at night, that stripper job which will net her five times what she currently makes. Tracy and Chris' already complicated life becomes more complicated: as Chris has his first case of puppy love, with an older "woman", Termina, who is one year ahead of him in school; when he discovers that his mother is working as a stripper; as Joe, a seemingly unemployed vacationer, enters their life, he the first man who has piqued her romantic interest since the divorce; and as Chris, on one of his odd jobs, stumbles upon what he believes is an opportunity for them to get out from under their financial burden, an opportunity, in Chris' naive child's view, which he is somewhat oblivious is fraught with adult dangers.—Huggo
Divorced mom Tracy Cross (Hawn) raises her 12-year-old son, Christopher (Arnott), in Key West in 1969 around the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Chris narrates the film in voice-over and talks about his "screwed up" life living with his mother in a cheap hotel. Chris' father (Carradine) was an Annapolis trained fighter pilot who had served in Vietnam. However, he became seriously disturbed after bombing a civilian hospital and burned his uniform as a "killers costume". Falling into alcoholism, he deserts Chris and Tracy moving into a commune separating himself from society. Chris hasn't seen his father in three years and still loves him deeply.
Chris delivers papers and fish to help support his mother who works as a bartender and waitress. He unwittingly discovers that there are drugs hidden in the fish he is delivering and becomes a small time drug dealer out of desperation when he finds his mother, Tracy, has resorted to working as a stripper to support them. She is ashamed when he confronts her with this, but she tells him that sometimes in life one has to do what is not good to get what is. Chris visits his father in the commune and attempts to get him to reconcile with Tracy but to no avail.
A stranger, Joe (Howard), comes to town and strikes up a relationship with Tracy. This further disturbs her son. Joe turns out to be a law-enforcement undercover agent, working to bring down the drug ring. His relationship with Tracy and her son complicates matters as the time comes to make the arrest. Chris narrowly escapes being killed when he delivers the drugs and it degenerates into a shootout. In the end, he spends the night in jail and is put on probation learning a valuable lesson. He and Tracy move into a mobile home park and she retires from stripping. The Apollo moon landing is mentioned throughout the film as a sort of metaphor and Chris mentions in the end how happy the astronauts must have been to have returned to the earth no matter how screwed up it is.
