Up and down Helsinki's mean streets, seventeen leather-jacketed wanderers, all named Frank, spend a long night trying to get to a seaside suburb where the air is clear. This is the premise for Kaurismäki's very dry spoof on the urban gang movie, part Scorsese, part Threepenny Opera, and all hilariously out of place in Helsinki. Kaurismäki's stock company of actors converge to form the Calamari Union, including Kari Väänänen as the gangland guru; Matti Pellonpää, with his indelible sneer; Pirkka-Pekka Petelius, playing a confirmed neurotic as he would in Hamlet Goes Business; Markku Toika doing a Finnish DeNiro, and Aki himself in a grave cameo. These are overgrown angels, actually with very clean faces hiding behind sunglasses at night, spouting platitudes with conviction and waxing poetic, each in his turn, about things like hunger, the inexplicable ignorance of their fellow man, and the crowded, hateful conditions under which they were raised.