An aging belle from the Southern upper class, Blanc DuBois loses everything at home due to her previous profligate debauchery.
She was a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi, but forced to leave her post for an indecent relationship with her boy students. She also loses her ancestral mansion – it has been taken by bank on mortgage. Being
destitute and homeless, Blanc arrives at her younger sister Stella Kowalski’s home in New Orleans. The streetcar she took names Desire.
The Kowalski’s lives in a cramped two-room apartment in a noisy, diverse, working-class neighborhood. Blanc’s brother-in-law Stanley is an auto-parts supply man of Polish decent. He is physically strong, harsh and rough in manner. His chief amusements are gambling with a couple of friends. Although Blanc now is completely destitute and has not a penny to her name, but she still bears herself with dignity like a lady. Her manner is dainty and frail, and at the same time she avoids reality, preferring to live in her own imagination. She lives in a perpetual panic about her fading beauty, about sunlight, and all bright light. Blanc and Stanley start to be repugnant to each other at their first meeting. Blanc is disdainful of that Stella marries Stanley, such an uneducated man of low social status, while Stanley hates Blanc’s pretentious and superiority. He doesn’t think Blanc trustworthy, he doubts that Blanc defrauded Stella of her legacies by playing tricks.
Blanc gets to know Kowalski''s buddy Mitch, who is coming for the poker game. Mitch is attracted to her. Blanc intended to get out of her destitute by marrying Mitch. But her dream is destroyed by Stanley, who managed to find out her past promiscuous life and told Mitch. As a result, Mitch does not show up to Blanc’s birthday dinner, and dumped her. This gives rise to Blanc’s insanity as she retreats fully into herself, leaving the objective world behind. Stella is about to deliver a baby and has been sent to
hospital. Coming back from the hospital, Stanley takes the final stabs at Blanc destroying the remainder of her sexual and mental esteem by raping her and then committing her to an insane asylum.