Gerald McRaney stars as Jake Lassiter, a colorful ex-football player turned top defense attorney who is hired to defend Dr. Roger Salisbury, a surgeon charged with malpractice in the mysterious death of a wealthy patient, Phillip Corrigan.

A killer for hire named Raven kills his target. However, he believes that he was just killing an ordinary person, but before he knows it, there's a massive manhunt for him. It seems that the man he killed is a senator. While trying to evade the police, he takes a woman, Anne hostage. Though he eventually lets her go. She develops some kind of fascination for him, which doesn't please her boyfriend, who just happens to be the one who tracking Raven. At the same time Raven tries to find out who set him up and why.

Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.

An eccentric, if not charming Southern professor and his crew pose as a band in order to rob a casino, all under the nose of his unsuspecting landlord – a sharp old woman.