In a Chicago junk shop, three small-time crooks plot to rob a man of his coin collection, the showpiece of which is a valuable “Buffalo nickel.” These high-minded grifters fancy themselves businessmen pursuing legitimate free enterprise. But the reality of the three – Donny, the oafish junk shop owner; Bobby, a young junkie Donny has taken under his wing; and “Teach,” a violently paranoid braggart – is that they are merely pawns caught up in their own game of last-chance, dead-end, empty pipe dreams.