Elwood is a young Black man growing up in early 1960s Florida, a segregated place where he is forever on the outside looking in. He attends a Black school (with hand-me-down textbooks from the White school), and spends his afternoons with the kitchen staff of the Whites-only hotel where his grandmother works as a maid. Elwood excels academically and believes he will see institutional change after hearing the persuasive rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. However, after enrolling early in a Black college through the tutelage of a politically engaged History teacher, Elwood accidentally ends up in a stolen car; his punishment is a stint at Nickel Academy, a harsh and illegally run juvenile detention center where he is tortured, abused, and otherwise traumatized.

Elwood is an optimist who is guided by a deep-seated moral code. Even during his incarceration in the senselessly violent Nickel, he tries to learn the rules so he can play by them. His commitment to fairness makes what he discovers about Nickel all the more horrifying: There are no rules; boys in Nickel are at the mercy of the sadistic savages that run the place; and there is no hope of relief since the prison fuels the local economy with graft, slave labor, and theft.