Clint Eastwood directs this gritty Academy Award-winning drama based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. Set in the Irish community of Boston, it tells the story of three childhood friends who have drifted apart over the years owing to a violent and disturbing experience they shared as children, and are forcibly reunited many years later following another tragic event. When ex-con Jimmy Markum's (Sean Penn) 19-year-old daughter Katie is murdered, the homicide detectives assigned to the case are Whitney Powers (Laurence Fishburne) and Jimmy's old friend Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon). Behind the scenes, Jimmy asks two of his relatives, the Savage brothers, to mount their own investigation, and the finger of suspicion begins to point to the final person in the childhood trio, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), who is now a broken man.