After being exiled from her hometown of Auriol, Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly at the New Orleans home of her pregnant sister Stella Kowalski and her Stella's husband Stanley. Stanley, both repulsed and attracted to Blanche, discovers that she has mortgaged property left to both sisters and spent all the money whereby he sets about discovering everything else he can about her past. Tension between Blanche and Stanley builds as time passes and is intensified when Blanche begins dating one of Stanley's poker buddies.