 Duddy returns to Montreal and starts a company to produce bar-mitzvah films.To this end he hires Friar, a blacklisted (in the United States, for his communist tendencies), alcoholic, avant-garde filmmaker.Since Duddy's childhood, his father, Max, had told him stories about Jerry Dingleman, the local "Boy Wonder" whose rags-to-riches story is canonical among the residents of St. Urbain Street.