Having run away as a self-hating, obese and abused 15-year old, William returns to his parents home after 10 years to attend his sister's wedding. He's happy in his new life, with a partner, steady work and having lost all of his excess weight. Being back at home revives all of awful memories of his childhood: overeating because it's the one thing nobody can stop him from doing; being hit by his drunken and abusive father; being seen by his grandmother when he has his first sexual encounter with a male friend; his mother arranging for him to have sex with a woman while she sat in the next room. New revelations are in store however.
Against all odds Father Flanagan starts "Boys' Town" after hearing a convict's story. Whitey Marsh comes there. He runs away but, hungry, returns. He runs away again but, when friend Pee Wee is hit by a car, returns. He runs away and joins his brother's gang. Flanagan and the boys capture the crooks and the reward saves the town.
James Whale, the director of Show Boat (1936), The Invisible Man (1933), Frankenstein (1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), had long since stepped back from the glamor and glitz of Hollywood. A stroke triggers once buried flashes of memory of his life in Dudley, his film career, and, most influentially, the trenches during the Great War. Haunted and lonely, he recounts many of his experiences to his musclebound gardener, Clay Boone. Despite the divide that exists between them, their friendship develops. Reliant on his sternly disapproving housemaid, Hannah, the flamboyant director whose time has passed sees himself slipping away, unable to stop the decline, and indulges his fantasies by coaxing Boone to model for him.
