"Nashville Lullaby" is an exploration of the devastating poverty of the 1920s South from the observant eyes of a six-year-old boy forced to be wise beyond his years. The boy, burdened and sharpened by a neurological disorder - uncontrollable tics, spasms, and night terrors - tries to process the desperate poverty of his close knit but fatherless family in 1926. In Louisiana, his uncle faces off a group terrorizing a black man, and the boy stumbles on Klan activity. In Nashville, where they move, he is taunted and brutally beaten by juvenile bullies because of his condition. And his mother struggles to find food and coal to keep the family alive.