Juanita, Sudie Bond, runs the Woolworth’s five-and-dime in McCarthy, Texas, and starts the day with gospel tunes on the radio. By her side, the all-female fan club Disciples of James Dean gathers for a reunion that marks the twentieth anniversary of the actor’s death. The mood is a blend of nostalgia and heat—“118 degrees in the shade”—as the group prepares to reassemble, hopeful that more members will arrive and add to the memory box they keep of a life they idolize.
Disciple Sissy, Cher, slips in late after tending to chores at the nearby truck stop, easing herself into the chatter with a mixture of humor and wary weather-forecast concern. The scene shifts to a stormy night in 1955, when Sissy hides inside the store and checks in on three friends—Mona, Sydney, and Joe Qualley. Joe, busy with Photoplay magazines, stands nearby as Mona’s arrival breaks the tentative quiet. The trio gathers at the front counter and shares a harmony in the doo-wop tune “Sincerely”, a moment that juxtaposes their devotion to James Dean with the simpler gospel sound that Juanita cherishes.
Mona, Sandy Dennis, returns to town after college, claiming the atmosphere had aggravated her asthma and doctors advised a home return. The reunion photos, taken years earlier in uniform jackets, resurface in her memory as she explains how the Disciples once dressed in those jackets—an emblem of their shared fandom. The group’s energy swells as Mona explains the surprise in the air: news that Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean will be in nearby Marfa, Texas, to film Giant, just sixty miles away. The prospect of seeing the stars up close inflames Mona’s dreams of stepping onto that set herself, and Joe drives her to Marfa to chase that dream.
In the modern-day thread, Mona makes a startling claim: while in Marfa, Dean chose her as the mother-to-be of his child, and her son Jimmy Dean is said to be Dean’s offspring. The assertion casts a shadow over the group, as Mona asserts that her son is mentally infirm and secluded from the town, a claim that Sissy resents as warped and demented. The tension crescendos when Mona’s temper flares, and Sissy steps outside to cool off while the town’s heat mimics the day’s literal furnace.
A new arrival disrupts the scene: a glimmering Porsche horn blares as a driver peers through the storefront window. The driver—a woman named Joanne, Karen Black—has come to McCarthy after reading a road-signed clue that James Dean’s son might be found at the old store. The Disciples learn that Joanne is not a stranger to the group; she is the former Joe Qualley, the club’s one male member who once wore a dress in high school and now returns under a new identity.
The story flashes back again to that less forgiving high school night. A young Joe, cross-dressed as Joanne, recalls a tense episode after a dance: a boy named Leicester T confronts Joe in a graveyard, dragging him to a grave and assaulting him while townsfolk jeer from behind a fence. The memory is painful but vivid, with Joe crying out that he kept calling Leicester T’s name, Joanne, as the assault unfolds. The girls—now adults—tend to the bruises and wounds, and Joe’s retelling centers on the struggle to reconcile identity with the town’s gaze.
Back in the present, the Disciples grapple with the possibility of Joanne’s identity: Stella Mae, Kathy Bates, and Edna Louise, Marta Heflin, wonder aloud if Joanne is “half-man, half-woman”—a hermaphrodite, a label meant to render the person comprehensible to the group. Joanne replies that she underwent a sex-change operation thirteen years ago, preferring to be seen simply as a freak if that’s what the others still fear to acknowledge.
As afternoon light wanes, a new disturbance arrives—thunder that isn’t just weather. Mona suspects the storm is actually the roar of a loud sports car: her own son, Jimmy Dean, has stolen Joanne’s Porsche and is racing through town. Joanne phones the Texas Highway Patrol, and the call ushers in a curiously quiet, almost ceremonial transition to the next chapter of the story.
A radio bulletin interrupts the moment, announcing that the actor James Dean has died in an automobile accident. The Disciples, old and new, pledge to hold a vigil for him, preserving the legend that bound them to their youth and to the town’s shared memory. Mona, meanwhile, returns to her claims about Giant and her role as an extra on the set, a detail none of the others can verify, and the group wonders about the limits of their own stories.
The 1975 reunion winds toward its close. Mona reflects on her asthma and the town’s dry warmth that helped her breathe again, suggesting that McCarthy’s climate may have saved her life in ways medicine could not. But the threads of truth begin to tighten around Joanne and Mona: the clues in Mona’s accounts, spoken aloud and heard in the same breath, begin to align in a way that makes sense of the tension that has haunted their friendship for years. The truth—carefully teased out in the course of the conversation—points to Joanne as the father of Mona’s son, and the group’s certainty begins to shift toward a shared, if unsettled, understanding.
With the crash of the final reveal looming, the Disciples drink together and decide to meet again in another twenty years. Mona, however, hesitates, choosing a different path that hints at a distance she’s never admitted to before. In the end, Joanne, Sissy, and Mona stand before the mirrors as they did in their youth, singing “Sincerely” one last time. The camera holds on their faces as the song fades into the wind, sweeping across the decayed storefront that once housed their faith, their friendships, and a town’s individual myth about a legend named James Dean.
