BROOKLYN BLEEDS

Overview

The film opens on a van speeding through Brooklyn at dusk. Inside, Chester Straight, hand bleeding through a blood-soaked towel, faces three mobsters demanding answers about his son. There is a struggle for a gun and the back window explodes in glass and blood.

The next morning, twelve-year-old Big Boy prepares for school in a quiet apartment. On his dresser sit sapphire rings, a gym bag filled with cash, and a small wooden display case. He hides the money, takes out a revolver, and walks into the neighborhood. Outside a public school, Big Boy approaches two older crack dealers and shoots them both at point-blank range. He drops the gun and runs, chased by police through the streets of Brownsville until he reaches a subway station.

Out on the tracks and cornered by officers, he hides the wooden box beneath the third-rail before being arrested. At the precinct, Detectives try to get him to talk, but he is unwilling or unable to speak. When detectives recover the box, its contents only deepen the mystery: the severed fingers of a man.

From there the story fractures backward.

In 1980s Brownsville, Chester Straight is a working-class rat catcher—proud, physical, and fiercely protective. He believes in discipline, work, and self-reliance. To Big Boy, he is larger than life—a man who can solve any problem. For his birthday, Big Boy begs for gold fronts. Chester promises to “buy his son a smile.”

When Chester loses his job and the local drug dealers recruit Big Boy, his options are limited and his family is on the line. Determined to keep his promise—and prove he can still protect his son—Chester partners with a small-time thief and breaks into the mausoleum of the Godfather of the Gambino Crime Family, stealing his gold teeth. The robbery ignites a chain reaction involving the Mob, the drug dealers, and a church whose miracles may be built on corruption. 

As detectives in the present try to understand the box, the money, and the shooting, the film moves between past and present—between faith and survival, myth and consequence. Finally, after we have learned where the gun, money and box came from, we return back to the van to see how Chester makes his ultimate move. Eliminating the only men who can expose his son’s connection to the theft, Chester ensures Big Boy’s survival, the only way left to him.