Joey Norton, seven years old, lives with his older brother Lennie in a lower middle class neighborhood of Brooklyn. Joey is too small to be taken seriously by Lennie and Lennie's friends. One day, while their mother is away visiting her sick mother, Lennie and his friends play a joke on Joey. They stage an incident so that Joey thinks he has shot and killed his brother. Francois Truffault credits this classic with inspiring the French New Wave.