Mickey (Philip Seymour-Hoffman) makes ends-meet by partaking in petty crime and gambling, with his friend Arthur (John Turturro), and then spending most of it in the local flea-pit bar before stumbling home to his long-suffering wife Jeanie (Christina Hendricks). When his mentally unstable step-son, Leon, is killed by a co-worker on a construction site - a crime that is quickly covered up and explained away as an 'accident', nobody in the depressed blue collar neighbourhood of God's Pocket is particularly sorry, except of course his own mother. Mickey tries to bury the bad news along with the body, but when Jeanie demands the truth, Mickey finds himself stuck in a struggle between a body he can't bury, a wife he can't please and a debt he can't pay .