It is the early 1960s: In a small town in a remote part of rural Ireland, young Francie Brady’s dreams of adventure and excitement, fuelled by comic books and TV, contrast with the grim reality of his family life. Francie shows a child’s mischievous face to the world, but privately he struggles with the hardships of his family’s imminent disintegration. His father is a drunk with shattered dreams and his mother has already been hospitalised once due to a nervous breakdown. Shunned by the local townspeople, he struggles with his sense of loss and pain as his fantasies become ever more grotesque and his behaviour more and more threatening…