Roland (Salén) is the 12-year-old son of a Russian Jewish mother (Frydman) and a socialist father (Skarsgård), coming of age in 1920s Stockholm. Due to his family's background, he has become an outcast to those around him, a constant target of School bullying by his peers, and often Humiliation and corporal punishment by a sadistic schoolteacher (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) in front of classmates. In retaliation against his tormentors, Roland steals condoms from his mother's tobacco shop inventory and turns them into crude slingshot weapons. He also falls in love with a neighborhood girl (Frida Hallgren), but as Roland attempts to toughen up and improve his troubled life, he also allies with the wrong group of friends and inadvertently makes himself a juvenile offender.