White Irish Drinkers is set in 1975 in the Bay Ridge area in Brooklyn, an enclave of working-class, hardscrabble families with a societal code that discourages any aspirations to leave the neighbourhood. In the thick of it are two brothers, Danny (Geoff Wigdor) and Brian (Nick Thurston), who dare to dream of life elsewhere. But their reasons for leaving, and their means of doing so, are so opposed that they threaten to destroy their entire family and, potentially, each other.