The story centres on a group of teenagers street cast in their neighbourhood and selected to play in a feature film during the summer. The film tells the story of this film shoot and of the connections that will be formed during it.

An agent from a distant planet has been sent to earth to ship large quantities of blood to his world, where a plague is ravaging the populace. He comes equipped with an interstellar matter transmitter, telepathic mind-control powers, and deathray-shooting eyes. Because he is also affected by the blood disease, he gains control of the town's physician and has him place a nurse at his disposal, while he collects live humans for fresh blood; but gains the nurse's suspicions, along with those of her boyfriend - a town police officer.

A well-bred young English lad living in lower Manhattan tries to gain acceptance from his not-so-well-bred peers at school.

Malik spends his days trying to get attention from others with empty, boring chats. One day, he catches the attention of one guy with a lie, saying that he's going to the US to study cinema. The news quickly goes around the neighborhood and Malik suddenly becomes everyones’s hope and pride.

In the 1950s, Seattle had plans to build one of the densest networks of freeways in the world. It would have displaced thousands, especially the poor and people of color. Over the next two decades, a broad coalition of communities came together and halted these plans. Testimonies from that era are juxtaposed with interviews of activists who participated in the revolt, giving a picture of what Seattle could have been had the people not stood up to the highway lobby and their representatives.