10-year-old Pixote endures torture, degradation, and corruption at a local youth detention center where two of its members are murdered by policemen who frame Lilica, a 17-year-old trans hustler. Pixote helps Lilica and three other boys escape and they start to make their living by a life of crime which only escalates to more violence and death.

In the beginning of the 20th Century, in the Northeast of Brazil, one of the first Brazilian industrialists is persecuted because he refuses to sell his business to a British company.