The odyssey of a young man in trouble with the law, Billy in the Lowlands stars Henry Tomaszewski as Billy Shaughnessy, a working-class project kid trying to make a place for himself in the world. After being sent away to a Massachusetts reformatory, Billy bursts out in hopes of reestablishing a relationship with his distant father. A fiction film drawn from real-life events and experiences, the cast includes both professional and nonprofessional actors. The late Vincent Canby found in this work "unexpected resources of compassion and humor and, more important, of unsentimental honesty."