Three young people, two boys and a girl, meet on a Friday evening in an urban post-disaster setting which has brought Helsinki to ruins. The boys' sole purpose of life is to play a Flip-Flop pinball machine.
Lauri Valjakka, a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, is thoroughly fed up with his family, whom he refers to as a "consumption unit," and his irritating, rigid wife. After a tedious train journey, Valjakka decides to leave his wife. He manages to escape to a station restaurant, where he meets an unusually honest man who has been abandoned and a straightforward woman.
Manne, Harri, and Ville Alfa are rootless twenty-somethings in search of purpose for their banal lives. After Manne steals a priceless painting from a group of petty criminals, Manne and Harri flee from the gangsters across Finland, while Ville goes to Paris. On the road they meet Veera, an old girlfriend of Harri's, and try to avoid the gangsters in pursuit.
