Ed Graczyk’s Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean offers explicit, numbing testament to the assertion that you can never go home again. Juxtaposing two celebrations together over a 20-year period (one in 1955, the other in 1975), the play hinges on a series of discoveries that reveal the dreams of small-town Americana to be rife with illusion and hypocrisy. The characters, all women save for one, are stuck in a time warp, unable to accept that they’re pushing 40 and that their small Texas town has dried up to nothing more than a husk comprised of a few dusty road signs and gas stations....Robert Altman’s film is characterized by a weird friction, as one can frequently sense the director’s inventive talent (which far surpasses the playwright’s) bumping up against the constraints of the material.

If Robert Altman hadn't directed this movie, the reviews would have described it as Altmanesque. It's a mixture of the bizarre and the banal, a slice of lives that could never have been led, a richly textured mixture of confessions, obsessions, and surprises.... This is not a great drama, but two things make the movie worth seeing: Altman's visual inventiveness and the interesting performances given by everyone in the cast. Although Sandy Dennis and Karen Black in many ways have more difficult roles, Cher is the one I watched the most because her performance here is a revelation. After years and years of giving us "Cher," she gives us a new character here, in a fine performance that creates sympathy for a sexpot who doubts her own sensuality.