Haunted by the death of her mother and without role models, dreamer Louise scours her world for someone to imitate. With the help of James Joyce's Ulysses and a taxi-driving poet, Louise discovers she is the woman she thought she would never be.

Prominent gang leader Cyrus calls a meeting of New York's gangs to set aside their turf wars and take over the city. At the meeting, a rival leader kills Cyrus, but a Coney Island gang called the Warriors is wrongly blamed for Cyrus' death. Before you know it, the cops and every gangbanger in town is hot on the Warriors' trail.