Downtown Detroit. Winter of next year. A fallen, dead-end street of bars, peep shows, bail bondsmen, and two pawn shops — Abramovich Pawn Bank and the more successful A-Action Loans. Cradling a black box, Jake Randall erupts from A-Action Loans and brakes to a where-now halt. Even at rest, he is a body in motion like the jiggly weight atop a hissing pressure cooker. His eyes burn like those of a madman, a genius, a thief. Wheeling, he collides with Jamal Estes, the Glass Man, a black teenager as invisible to the world as the windows he cleans. Jamal’s boom box blares guitar music — his own — a violent rush of notes fighting to rise.

Inside Abramovich’s shop, Mrs. Ivanovna, a babushka’d yenta, haggles with another elderly Russian immigrant, Isaac Abramovich — one of those rock-like old men within whom much strength abides. When Jamal’s pregnant girlfriend, Mahalia, interrupts, Ivanovna learns that the neighbor girl has decided to keep her baby despite Jamal’s fears that it will trap them all in dead-end lives from which he has found an unexpected exit.

Jamal shares with Abramovich — the only man ever to have taken the street urchin seriously — that if Jamal can obtain the money to finance a recording session, a promoter will represent his music. Jamal’s tentative request for a loan is thwarted, however, by sudden news that Babbage, owner of A-Action Loans has been robbed by a madman claiming to be the inventor of a mysterious black box.

That night, the madman, Randall, offers his mysterious box to Abramovich — pledge for a loan to obtain a vital missing part. Convinced by the young man’s story and burdened with a lifelong accumulation of broken promises, Abramovich embraces the pledge as a final chance to nurture one true dream. Blinded by hope, however, he defaults on tacit vows made to Jamal.

Betrayed by Abramovich’s confidence in Randall, Jamal retaliates by stealing the money meant to purchase the vital part. In the boy’s anger, Abramovich recognizes his own rage at a father who sacrificed his son in pursuit of an ideal. Bankrupt, Abramovich  sells his pawn shop to Babbage, risking everything on the madman’s pledge.

In the final scenes, true thieves are revealed. Through shared forgiveness, all come to know the meaning of pledges, the nature of faith, the value of family, and the possibility of atonement. Reconciled, Abramovich, Jamal, Ivanovna, and Mahalia wait together for dawn of a new day when Randall’s mysterious box will lift the world .... if he returns as promised.