In Baltimore in 1960, a troubled high-school student Dawn Davenport Earl Peterson grows increasingly ungrateful when her parents refuse to buy the cha-cha heels she longs for at Christmas. In a furious outburst, she smashes the presents, topples the family tree, and storms out of the house, nearly naked as she hitchhikes a ride with a lecherous man. That encounter leads to an unwanted pregnancy, and she eventually gives birth to a daughter who will grow up in a world shadowed by neglect and fear.
The young mother drifts through a string of dead-end jobs—a diner waitress, a stripper—and slides into petty crime, engaging in burglary and street prostitution with two old high-school friends, Concetta and Chicklette. Dawn remains tethered to a life shaped by impulse and vanity, a trajectory that seems to promise little happiness but plenty of drama.
At the Lipstick Beauty Salon, where appearances are everything, Dawn marries her hair stylist and next-door neighbor, Gater Nelson. The shop’s owners, Donald Dasher and Donna Dasher, recruit Dawn into an artistic experiment they claim will prove that "crime and beauty are the same"—and they photograph her crimes to feed her craving for fame. The experiment uses Dawn as a living canvas, transforming her home into a showroom of glamour and danger, while she is pressured to perform more reckless acts.
Aunt Ida Nelson, Gater’s aunt, is embittered by the marriage she hoped would bring him to men, not women, and she blames Dawn for the upheaval in their family. When the union collapses, Dawn convinces the Dashers to fire Gater, who then relocates to Detroit to pursue factory work. Ida, driven by revenge, darkens Dawn’s life with a vicious acid attack that leaves her disfigured. The Dashers counsel Dawn to reject corrective surgery, instead capitalizing on the altered look as part of a grotesque, staged beauty. They also kidnap Ida and imprison her in a birdcage, presenting Dawn with an axe as a cruel token of retribution.
As Dawn’s daughter grows up, she becomes increasingly aware of her mother’s crimes and the lifestyle that surrounds them. The teenager—distressed by the chaos and Dawn’s insistence that she is intellectually disabled—traces her father’s identity, only to find him living a life of squalor. When he attempts to molest her, she defends herself with a knife and ends up killing him. Dawn, meanwhile, insists on keeping Taffy close, and the girl retreats into a religious turn, announcing she is joining the Hare Krishna movement.
Dawn’s career as a nightclub performer takes center stage, with ever-more outlandish outfits and performances. Behind the scenes, Taffy appears in religious attire, and Dawn fulfills her threat by strangling her. The performance escalates into chaos: Dawn bounces on a trampoline, tears a phone directory to shreds, and cavorts in a crib full of dead fish. She even dresses a gun onstage and opens fire on the audience, wounding and killing several people. The police arrive to quell the crowd, but agents themselves shoot some of the audience while allowing the Dashers to escape, claiming they are upright citizens.
Dawn runs into the forest but is soon captured and brought to trial for murder. At the hearing, the Dashers secure immunity from prosecution for their testimony against her and manipulate Ida into giving false testimony to secure Dawn’s conviction. Dawn’s defense attorney seeks a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury convicts her and sentences her to die in the electric chair. In prison, she says goodbye to a fellow inmate and her lesbian partner, Earnestine. Dawn is eventually escorted to the chair, where she delivers a final, staged speech to an imaginary audience as if accepting an award, and she is executed. Her life, marked by a relentless blend of crime, glamour, and personal betrayal, meets a stark, televised end.
