Honey Don’t! Is Only Worth Watching For the Sexual Swagger

If the Coen brothers insist on continuing to go their separate ways, I suppose there are worse ways for Ethan to spend his time than on making self-described “lesbian B-movies” with his wife Tricia Cooke. But, like Drive-Away Dolls, the couple’s previous collaboration, Honey Don’t! is enough like a Coen brothers film in its comic timing to make comparisons inevitable when you watch it — even if, as with Joel’s solo work, it feels like you’re only getting half of what was once a very distinctive sensibility. Joel seems to be the purgatorial brother, while Ethan is the blackly funny one, and in this new movie, he plunges headlong into a sunshine noir set in Bakersfield, California that’s more of a series of digressions than it is a coherent mystery. The best detective stories often aren’t easy to follow, taking convolutions and leaving narrative dead-ends lying around, but many of Honey Don’t!’s major elements are just there for the vibes. Its shagginess feels like a challenge, daring the audience to decide if it’s just goofy, just horny, or just diverting enough to make up for how it runs out of gas long before the credits roll.

Honey Don’t! is named for the Carl Perkins song, but also for its main character, a private eye named Honey O’Donahue who dresses like she just left a swing dance revival and has a tendency to keep tugging at threads even when she’s not on the clock, just because she’s bored. She’s played by Drive-Away Dolls star Margaret Qualley, who does look amazing in all those high-waisted pants and polka-dot dresses. She’s not very convincing as a hard-boiled type, even after Honey starts poking around into whether the roadside death of a woman who’d made an appointment to see her was really accidental. But then again, I also didn’t really buy Chris Evans as a seedy church leader named Reverend Drew, who makes sleeps with congregation members in fetish gear and also happens to run a drug dealing operation on the side. And while her deadpan is funny, Aubrey Plaza comes across as play-acting in the part of MG, a butch cop that Honey meets during one of her regular visits to the police department and decides to invite into her bed. Honey Don’t! lays out a world that is consistently off-kilter, but doesn’t really commit to it beyond a surface level.

What it does care about, and devotes an admirable amount of energy to, is fucking, mostly of the queer variety. The guiding tenet of both Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t! seems to be injecting explicit lesbian swagger into established genres like road trip and detective movies. Honey, like many a P.I. in fiction, is a loner who has trouble with emotional commitment — but she isn’t shy about her physical desires. The first time she and MG meet up at a bar, she immediately pulls the other woman’s hand out of the frame, and they exchange snappy banter about hobbies while Honey gets increasingly breathy due to what MG is doing down there (“I love first-date stuff,” MG cracks). There’s a bravado to these interludes that goes beyond a desire to be sexy. The movie cuts from the two women in a sweaty clinch in bed to Honey washing her anal beads and dildos in the sink the next morning, as though trying to blunt-force broaden on-screen depictions of lesbian intimacy by way of sex toys. It’s an endearing effort that, like the 1999-set Drive-Away Dolls’ same-sex marriage motif, feels untethered from the current conversation. When Honey angrily slaps an “I have a vagina and I vote” bumper sticker over the MAGA one on her niece’s scumbag boyfriend’s car, it’s a mild shock to learn that the movie is taking place in the present day.

Much of Drive-Away Dolls could be described as mild. The revelation that the mob Reverend Drew reports to is French, with their main contact being a Vespa-riding, bob-haired fatale played by Lera Abova, is mildly amusing. A scene where a drug deal falls apart in a parking lot and leads to an accidental murder involves some mildly memorable choreography. A scene where Honey’s wayward father tries to reconnect with his family, only to terrify them, is mildly ironic. The highs may not be that high in Honey Don’t!, but the lows are never that low, either, until the final act. The solution to the mystery in town, as much as it can be solved, is a genuinely frustrating, out-of-the-blue swerve. It’s barely a twist, in that the character who turns out to be responsible isn’t developed enough for the reveal to be a surprise. Despite the verve of the film, there’s no there there — just an exercise in quippy banter and witty violence that works well enough to remind you of better movies.