Over two years, from December 1995 to January 1998, filmmaker Steven Okazaki tracks five young heroin addicts living in San Francisco as they cycle through highs, arrests, relapses, and failed attempts at getting clean. The camera follows them into flophouses, alleys, and treatment centers, capturing them shooting up, nodding off, and talking with unsettling candor about what the drug does to them and why they keep going back. Interviews with parents and counselors sit alongside the addicts' own accounts, which shift between bravado and despair often within the same sentence. There is no narrator softening the material or explaining it away; the film lets the subjects' physical deterioration and their own words carry the story. One young woman's transformation over the two-year shoot becomes the clearest evidence of what black tar heroin does to a body and a life. The result is blunt and often hard to watch, closer to observational record than argument, ending without resolution for most of the people in it.