On September 30, 1975, an all-female fan club called the Disciples of James Dean meets inside a Woolworth's five-and-dime store in McCarthy, Texas, to honor the twentieth anniversary of the actor's death. The store is only a short distance from Marfa, where Dean filmed Giant in 1955. Over the course of the reunion, the six members—Joanne (or "Jo" for short), Stella Mae, Edna Louise, Mona, Sissy and store owner Juanita—experience a day full of revealed secrets and revelatory experiences, several of them through flashbacks. Among those secrets, Mona announces that she was an extra in Giant, and Joanne declares she had a sex change operation after living as a man. In Jimmy Dean, Altman frequently uses mirrors as a device for seamlessly connecting scenes between the present and the past. Reflections in mirrors are part of many of the film's frame compositions.As noted Daniel O'Brien in Robert Altman: Hollywood Survivor, they "[become] a window into 1955, enabling the characters to gaze into the past".