In 1966, Trenton New Jersey still seemed stuck in the cross hairs of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The British Invasion was in full effect and white kids were now listing to black music but the era of Frank Sinatra still held sway with some. For high school senior Jill Rosen (Rosanna Arquette) it’s a particularly confusing era; an aspiring actress, she is trying to embrace the times, find her own voice, and gain her independence, but when she is wooed by and then eventually gets in a relationship with an odd, new, rebelliously hunky greaser at school, known as Sheik (Vincent Spano), her place in the world, her values and aspirations, are challenged. Even after Jill goes away to college and her experiences are expanded, he still lingers in her mind as a representation of her past, a life she can’t quite outgrow.

Arvid (Dejan Cukic) is a pushover who can't seem to find his way in life. He works at a bank and lives with his girlfriend, Hanne. The two get into an argument over breakfast because Arvid donated 800 crowns to a church fund—money that Hanne wanted to use for shopping. As he tries to move past the dispute unscathed she makes him out to be a boring purist who's trying to save the world.

We then jump to Richard (Lester Wiese), a traveling American who settles into a seat at a bar and has a mysterious meeting with Arvid at noon. The bartender and a patron start to chat with him. With two hours to spare until Arvid's arrival, he recaps the recent series of events that have put Arvid in a delicate situation—a man who up until 12 days prior Richard had never heard of.

The rest of the film is a series of flashbacks leading up to Arvid's meeting with Richard. Following his argument with Hanne, Arvid went to work and encountered a disgruntled customer who decided to help himself to a “loan” with a shotgun. Tired of standing on the sidelines, Arvid strikes the man with a racket and puts an end to the sloppy robbery. His employers decide to reward him for his heroic efforts and send him home early with a paid vacation. When he gets to his apartment he discovers that his girlfriend has left him and taken all of their furniture. A woman comes to his door and starts to attack him, claiming that she's the girlfriend of the man he interfered with at the bank and that they needed the money to try and get in vitro fertilization. Out on the street, a crummy rock band attacks him on the grounds of being a hero.

A lot of films about drugs and drug users take an exploitive yet ultimately moralistic tone about their contentious subject matter. Actors are given scenery to chew as either addicts or dealers. Junkies waste away tragically, but elegantly, and the dealers are suave thugs making the most of their Faustian bargain of a career. So often we are meant to envy the way the characters give a middle finger to societal rules and yet, when they ultimately reach their downfall, we are encouraged to feel morally superior. Call it a cultural byproduct of our country's draconian drug laws where all drugs are equally bad. (Except for alcohol which never causes any problems whatsoever.)

The thing I love about Go is the refreshing lack of judgment on the characters. It’s a movie about a random assortment of relatively amoral young people in L.A. in one insane 24-hour period. They work dead end jobs, they go to raves, and they take ecstasy. They’re basically good kids, just young and broke and out for a good time. They get into trouble, but not the kind of finger-wagging clichéd trouble that a bad screenwriter would normally concoct for these characters. It's more of the absurdist kind of trouble that Quentin Tarantino used in various plotlines of Pulp Fiction.