Roman Rodavenga is an impoverished graduate student in the eighth futile year of laboring on his philosophy dissertation. He lives in a cramped, rent-controlled apartment in Alphabet City. When we meet him, he is on his way to visit the darkly charismatic local pawnshop owner, Lerman, who sells drugs and other contraband out of his suffocating apartment. Little does Lerman know that Roman is planning to kill him as part of a half-baked experimental acting out of his radical philosophical theories...