The greatest joy of loving movies is that there’s always something new to discover. No matter how many films you’ve watched, something new from decades past eludes you. You can go to bed at night having experienced a meaningful work of art you didn’t know existed when you first opened your eyes that day! And this prospect is especially thrilling when it involves trans-centric cinema.

This phenomenon befell yours truly one fateful Monday afternoon when I was scouring Letterboxd for movies involving trans women I’d never seen before. That’s when Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean first appeared on my radar. I’d watched and praised plenty of features from director Robert Altman before. However, I had somehow never heard of this 1982 directorial effort. Seeing a praise-heavy Letterboxd review from writer Willow McCain on the film’s profile, I was convinced.. And by the end of Jimmy Dean, I was floored and crestfallen. How had this movie evaded me for so long?

Jimmy Dean character Joanne (Karen Black) isn’t “perfect” trans representation. But what on Earth is? She and the movie as a whole deserve far more recognition than their current obscure status in American culture.

Screenwriter Ed Graczyk (adapting his 1976 play of the same name) begins Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean at a Woolworth’s store in McCarthy, Texas in 1975. This used to be the go-to social hangout spot for a bunch of teenagers 20 years ago. Now, it’s a run-down domicile devoid of customers. However, on this particular day, Woolworth’s owner Juanita (Sudie Mund) is preparing for a grand event. The members of the All-Female Fan Club Disciples of James Dean are reuniting. Members like Mona (Sandy Dennis), Sissy (Cher), Stella (Kathy Bates), and Edna (Mart Heflin) will all see each other for the first time in decades.

Previously, the one assigned-male-at-birth outlier in this fan club was Woolworth’s employee Joe Qualley (Mark Patton). Always covered in overalls and carrying a passion for James Dean, Joe was a kind soul that everyone in the club adored, particularly Mona. Memories of him and the other Disciples flutter through Mona’s mind on the day of this reunion. As familiar faces pile into Woolworths, this super-confident woman named Joanne arrives in a Porsche and browses the store. Initially presenting herself as a stranger, Joanne eventually reveals that she’s somebody the Disciples have always known. Their dear friend Joe was actually a woman named Joanne.

What’s pleasantly surprising about Graczyk’s depiction of this scene is the range of reactions to Joanne’s revelation. Mona is “hurt” hearing this development. Stella immediately does the typical cishet woman thing of bombarding Joanne with inquiries about surgery. But Sissy is instantly happy and supportive of this development. She immediately calls Joanne “sister,” marvels at her beauty, and nonchalantly holds hands with her like a long-time gal pal. It’s rare, even now, to see cinema with cis women supporting trans women, and it’s even more special to see this in a film from four decades ago.

Equally exciting to witness is Joanne demanding the uber-religious and bigoted Juanita stop dead-naming and misgendering her. These reaffirmations of her gender identity are cheer-worthy moments. Juanita scrambling to find a Bible passage to stigmatize transness is captured on-screen as pathetic. We live in an age where Netflix pours tens of millions towards cishet male comedians who mock “pronouns,” What a welcome relief to see a 1982 movie depicting respecting people’s gender identity as a good thing!

Graczyk’s intimate scope for Jimmy Dean benefits Joanne as a character. Throughout the feature, she and other characters gaze into the gigantic mirror behind the Woolworth’s bar. Here, visions of the past play out on-screen. Such flashbacks lend insight into Joanne’s troubled past, the friendships she fostered as a teenager, and the cruelty from folks like Juanita that informed her leaving this town behind. The dismissive approach to trans women in other movies is absent here in Jimmy Dean. Confinement to one location, not to mention recurring yesteryear digressions, gives audiences plenty of chances to explore Joanne’s inner world.

Best of all, Joanne, gets to be a cool, sexy, and morally complicated figure. That’s a departure from typical portrayals of trans women, who are usually Ace Ventura-style punching bags or corpses motivating cop stories. Trans women endure mockery or silence in most pop culture representations. Meanwhile, Joanne’s role in Jimmy Dean is a lot more nuanced and complicated. She’s, if anything, one of the more well-adjusted members of the group.

As adults, these women are all encumbered with toxic means of continuing the evasion of the real world that first attracted them to James Dean. Sissy’s trapped in a marriage that only she thinks is thriving. Mona is obsessed with keeping her son from the wider world and sharing unreliable anecdotes about her time on the set of Giant. Juanita clings to her pro-Jesus sentiments while dismissing any notion that her husband could be anything but perfect. And so Joanne is not around to function as “the freak” amidst her cis women comrades. On the contrary, she’s the only principal character in touch with reality.

The victim of a hate crime and dysphoria, she didn’t have the privilege of her friends to cast aside the darkness of the world. For Joanne, it was inescapable. She eventually left this small town, pursued her gender goals, and got a splashy enough job to afford that Porsche. Throughout the story, Joanne is depicted as the only one conscious of reality. She openly talks about repressed matters like Juanita’s husband’s alcoholism and Sissy’s husband’s infidelity. Joanne doesn’t exist to be “othered” in Jimmy Dean. Instead, she’s a vivid reminder that a wider world exists out there beyond Sissy, Mona, and Juanita’s suffocating fantasies

Despite this awareness, Jimmy Dean frames Joanne as just as messy and complicated as the story’s other women. She doesn’t have to be a “model” citizen or “ideal” trans women to exist on-screen. This is explicitly clear in an unforgettable scene where Joanne recalls her encounter with fellow McCarthy denizen Leicester T. Back in 1955. Leicester brutally assaulted Joanne in a graveyard as part of a transphobic hate crime. Cut to decades later and Joanne encountered Leicester again at a bar…only her attacker had no idea who she was. Leicester didn’t recognize her and began to flirt with her like she was just a lady stranger in a bar.

In tight close-up shots, Joanne recalls the complicated emotions she felt as Leicester got closer and closer to her body. Here was the man who inflicted unspeakable physical misery on her years earlier. Yet, now, in her own way, she had power over him. She wielded a body he craved and the idea of taking that control, without Leicester realizing the historical significance of the situation fascinated Joanne. To her, it felt like a mixture of sweet, sweet vengeance interspersed with horrific reminders of past trauma.

The interaction Joanne describes, of a cishet male sexually attracted to a woman he doesn’t realize is trans, sounds like a go-to 90s or 2000s comedy movie scenario. It’s easy to visualize it playing out from the eyes of that male figure. The audience would be encouraged to express disgust and repulsion in unison with this man. Jimmy Dean, however, explores this situation exclusively from Joanne’s perspective. Audiences don’t even see a flashback to this sequence that would, even temporarily, put viewers in Leicester’s point-of-view.

The camera instead emphasizes intimate shots chronicling Joanne’s recounting of the story. These visual norms mean Jimmy Dean prioritizes Joanne’s complicated response to attracting a man who inflicted so much pain on her. Here is a movie daring to ask “what’s her story?”

This transfixing sequence doesn’t just crystallize the film’s fascinating willingness to let trans women be nuanced. It’s also a showcase for Karen Black’s remarkable performance as Joanne. Jimmy Dean is yet another American motion picture with a cis performer playing a trans character. (It’s expected for the time even if there were plenty of options for trans women performers in this era for the production to choose.) That being said, Black’s Joanne performance is one of the better, and possibly the best, work I’ve ever seen from a cis woman inhabiting a trans woman in film.

Cis performers portraying trans women typically default to very broad physical or vocal flourishes to emphasize “this woman is DIFFERENT.” Cis women actors handling these roles tend to be a tad more subdued than, say, Jared Leto in Dallas Buyer’s Club. However, you still have Pam Grier’s digitally lowered voice when she played a trans woman in Escape from L.A.. Meanwhile, Felicity Huffman’s deeper-pitched Transamerica vocals were so pronounced they inspired a transphobic Jon Stewart retort at the 78th Academy Awards. Joanne’s first scene is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Here, she strolls into Woolsworth and just presents herself as a random stranger that’s rolling through town. There’s no distracting pronounced flourishes immediately announcing Joanne as out of the ordinary.

Joanne instantly registers as something very different from Juanita and Mona, but not because she’s “not a real woman.” The stark difference between her and the Woolsworth employees is her class status. Arriving into this town in a sports car and walking around in fancy garb, Joanne instantly registers as both classy and hot. She exudes a confident composed air that folks stuck in McCarthy, Texas yearn for. Karen Black mesmerizingly captures that aura while presenting Joanne in a naturalistic fashion. She doesn’t do anything to emphasize the idea that Joanne is “different” or “weird.” After all, the other leads at first don’t even realize Joanne is someone they already know.

Black opts for subtlety and finds other ways to define Joanne beyond her transness. Confident physicality, class status, and a thoughtful speaking style are the bedrock of Black’s performance. Joanne’s later displays of vulnerability see Black portraying those pronounced emotional exhibitions with grace and finesse. Everything about her performance feels so specific to Joanne as a character rather than torn from the horrific legacy of cis actors playing trans roles.

So much about Joanne is a delightful pleasant surprise. However, there’s also a bittersweet quality to watching this character in 2024. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean hit theaters in 1982. A year later, the AIDS outbreak would hit new levels of public notoriety. A Reagan-informed American culture panicked over anything queer. In an ideal world, Joanne would’ve been followed up by more trans characters with nuanced portrayals — hopefully played by actual trans people. Instead, the AIDS crisis sent queer cinema back to the closet. When queer folks did show up, they were like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia: chaste, angelic figures designed to win over the sympathies of cishet viewers.

America’s systemically ingrained homophobia was amplified throughout the 80s. That started, among other toxic pop culture trends, a cruel norm demonizing trans women’s bodies. The stigma of gay panic or “catching the AIDS’ ensured that every 90s cinema cis man had to vomit after discovering they’d just slept with or encountered a trans woman. The varied reactions from the cis members of the Jimmy Dean fan club to Joanne’s transness vanished in subsequent decades. A singular mocking response instead reigned supreme. No wonder Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean now evokes some sorrow. Joanne should’ve opened doors for more complex trans characters in cinema. Instead, she was a last gasp for thoughtful trans rep in cinema for years.

Given those subsequent horrors, it’s easy to appreciate the lovely touches Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean delivers with Joanne. This includes letting her, Mona, and Sissy anchor the final pre-credits sequence, as “The McGuire Sisters” reunite one last time. Joanne does not perish before the credits roll like so many other trans characters in film. Instead, she’s alive and well singing with her closest friends from her teenage years. It’s a beautiful bonding moment for the trio allowing Joanne to vibrantly and poignantly close out the feature. It’s also a conclusion epitomizing the deeply human approach to Joanne that makes Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean such a welcome surprise among trans representation in 20th-century cinema.

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