Spike Fumo is an Italian kid apsiring to be a boxer. He falls in love with a rich girl, who turns out to be the daughter of a Mafia boss. Spike is threatened to leave Bensonhurst by the mob, and then goes to a poverty-stricken Puerto Rican part of Brooklyn.

Fiction and documentary mingle in a freewheeling portrait of Susan Superstar, a New York celebrity on a drug-fueled downward slide that mirrors Edie Sedgwick’s own self-destructive spiral.