Maniac Magee (film) - Plot

Plot

The movie opens with 12-year-old Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee as an orphan. Maniac can run extremely fast on railroad tracks. Hector Street divides Two Mills by race: blacks on East End, whites on West End. The racial tensions are very strong. Maniac is confused by racial biases; to him, the people are simply people - heterogeneous, but with much in common, such as both kindness and cruelty.

Jeffrey's parents were killed by a drunk driver just after his father told him that he would show him his infamous "stopball." After his parents' funeral, a couple tells Jeffery to "come with them." Maniac taught himself to fly and learns how to run.

After one year of running, Jeffrey arrives in Two Mills and quickly befriends people on both sides of the unofficial segregation line. Among them are an African-American family with a girl his age named Amanda Beale, with whom he lives for a while. He also meets James Down (known as "Hands") a football player impressed by Jeffrey's own speed, dexterity, and agility.

Later, the racial intolerance he encounters prompts Jeffrey to realize that the Beale family is different than he is. As a result, he flees the town and hides in the buffalo enclosure of the local zoo. The buffaloes, a mother and a calf, accept Jeffrey as one of their own. One day, he starts to live in a gymnasium on the premises, creating a nearly utopian life of interdependence and mutual learning. Jeffrey learns that Grayson, a groundskeeper at the zoo, was once a Minor League baseball player, forced to retire after a spectacular failure that came in the wake of a sequence of victories. Grayson, in turn, learns to read, a skill he had neglected through childhood. After Christmas, Grayson dies in his sleep.

Jeffrey, heartbroken, flees to Valley Forge and there waits to die. He is prevented from dying by two runaway boys, Piper and Russell McNab, whom he bribes into leaving Valley Forge and going home. While they are eating at a pizza restaurant in Two Mills, the boys' older brother John appears. John is a tall bully who was humiliated in a baseball game by Jeffrey, who was the only kid who could hit John's fastballs. For returning the younger duo, John forgives Jeffrey and takes him home. In the McNab house, Jeffrey sees gluttony, squalor, racial prejudice, and sloth.

Due to struggles that result from his unique social position — that of a homeless integrator — Jeffrey leaves the McNabs and roams all over the town, sleeping where he might and running at his own great pace through the streets in the early morning. During his runs, he sees Mars Bar again, who also runs early in the morning. The two run next to each other in silence, acknowledging one another through looks but not words.

The movie closes with a group of kids finding out their friend is a daughter of Maniac Magee and they have a son named Maniac Jr., and that Amanda married Magee. The final scene shows older Magee throwing the ball to Jr., and he swings the ball with it smoking in the air.