Evelyn Couch is a dissatisfied housewife in 1980s Birmingham, Alabama, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly woman, Ninny Threadgoode, at a nursing home. Over a series of visits, Ninny tells Evelyn about two women — Idgie and Ruth — who ran the Whistle Stop Cafe together in 1920s Alabama and weathered everything the world threw at them. A film that moves between two time periods, two friendships, and one story about what women are capable of when they decide to stop accepting what they are given.