Ethan Coen’s Queer Buddy Comedy Is a Car-Wreck

A road trip. A mix-up. A fast-talking hero, prone to tossing off bewilderingly verbose sentences. Some criminals who run the gamut from eccentric to psychotic to painfully inept. (Sometimes, they’re all three at once.) Dangerously sudden violence. Dangerously dark humor. Dangerously outrageous hairdos. The feeling that you’re watching a vintage film noir story run through a Looney Tunes filter. You are in the presence of a Coen brothers movie — whaddaya need, a road map?!

Actually, some sort of GPS system would be a blessing for both you, the viewer, and the makers of Drive-Away Dolls, one of whom is indeed a Coen. Along with his brother Joel, Ethan Coen spent close to four decades as one half of a filmmaking duo that became synonymous with a certain type of moviegoing experience. The work might be manic and comedic (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading), or menacing and head-scatchingly existential (Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, No Country For Old Men). If you got lucky, it could be both (Barton Fink, Fargo, A Serious Man). Even before the siblings decided to pursue separate projects behind the camera, Ethan had a vibrant creative life outside of the partnership, having written plays, poetry, and a collection of short stories. Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, the 2022 doc on the rock & roll legend he made with his wife/editor Tricia Cooke, suggested he could work a nice side hustle as a portrait artist if he wanted to.

This second collaboration between Coen and Cooke, from a script the two had worked on together back in the late 1990s, treads into some extremely recognizable territory. It’s Philadelphia, 1999. A man (Pedro Pascal) walks into a bar. He’s carrying a briefcase. When the person he meets doesn’t show up, he ducks into an alleyway and is forcibly relieved of his package. Soon, a well-tailored gangster (we love you, Colman Domingo) and two dim-witted thugs (C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick) show up at a business that specializes in hiring folks to drive vehicles to a certain location. They’re going to deliver the briefcase to a client in Tallahassee, Florida. Can the proprietor pass them the item they sent over the day before, pretty please?

The problem is, the shop’s easily confused owner (Bill Camp) thought that two young women who came in earlier, asking about a “drive-away” ride to the Sunshine State, were the ones making the drop. The crooks now have to find the duo who unwittingly took off with the package and retrieve it. This is the part where you expect an incoming slew of hot interstate pursuits, close calls, the type of ha-ha-bang-bang that’s become a Coen-production signature, thrills, spills and/or some chills. Added elements may include a dirty politician, a severed head in a basket, and a number of highbrow references — say, the novels of Henry James — butting up against a blizzard of dick jokes. The legacy of the Plaster Casters plays a part. Beanie Feldstein shows up as a perpetually angry cop. Matt Damon drops by for a cameo, thanks to an industry mandate stating that one out of every five movies must feature a Matt Damon cameo.

There’s one thing that separates Drive-Away Dolls from the usual pulp-fiction deconstruction template that the brothers had perfected in the past, however. It’s the extraordinary amount of glorious, out-and-proud queerness that’s embedded into the story, something that you’d be at pains to find in their previous work. Cooke identifies as a lesbian (she and Ethan have what they‘ve deemed a nontraditional relationship) and had mentioned at a recent Q&A that she started throwing around ideas for this partially out of frustration over not seeing a certain type of representation onscreen. She’s also namechecked Russ Meyers’ exploitation masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! as a touchstone, and you can see the influence of a certain era’s primal-screen pleasures all over this. The original title, Cooke said, was Drive-Away Dykes, which purposefully suggests the second half of a Forty-Deuce grindhouse double bill. Judges would’ve also accepted Drive-In Dolls as well. It takes place in the Nineties and benefits from the 21st century’s sex-positivity, but wow, does this have late Sixties/early Seventies B movie envy all over it!

But it’s the two LGBTQ lead characters, young and inadvertently on the run, that provide what little fuel is in the tank here. Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a bookish introvert and hasn’t been intimate with anyone since a breakup with a girlfriend several years prior. Her best friend, Jamie (Margaret Qualley), is a Texas ex-pat in Philly who lives for impromptu hook-ups and body shots at the local bar. The first thing that Jamie does after she invites herself along to Marian’s trip south to see her mom is map out every LGBTQ hotspot on the route. She’s determined to make sure her friend enjoys the more carnal side of life on the trip, be it in a small town’s resident lesbian hangout or at a female soccer team’s basement party. This is a movie that is anything but shy about sex and is a strong contender for having the most dildo-related punchlines per capita than any film released in the last 75 years. The tension between these young women is less will-they-or-won’t-they, so much as how steamy things might get. (Spoiler: Literally steamy at one point.)

So why does Drive-Away Dolls constantly feel like it’s behind the wheel of the wrong make and model for its intended destination? Part of it is the delivery system — there’s no one more qualified to make a Coenesque film than a genuine Coen brother, yet the mix of cracked noir tropes and a sapphic take on a vintage sexcapade flick feels like the cinematic equivalent of a bad blind date. Neither of the movies going on here syncs up, which makes the kooky crime elements and the buddy-comedy storyline feel like they’re jockeying for space. Only Qualley seems to realize that she’s in a romp made by one half of the team behind O Brother Where Art Thou?, and is consistently trying to amp up the Lone Star lilt, the volume and the velocity of this variation on the screwball “dizzy dame” archetype. Meanwhile, Viswanathan — as delightful a comic dynamo as you’ll find these days — is given a mousy, uptight character that struggles to be even one-dimensional.

The necessary fire-and-ice chemistry never takes. Neither, for that matter, do the psychedelic interludes straight out of a Fillmore concert and flop-sweat attempts at blood-flecked zaniness. You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile. We weren’t joking about the GPS — Drive-Away Dolls is a mash-up that needs a sense of direction, and badly.

A road trip. A mix-up. A fast-talking hero, prone to tossing off bewilderingly verbose sentences. Some criminals who run the gamut from eccentric to psychotic to painfully inept. (Sometimes, they’re all three at once.) Dangerously sudden violence. Dangerously dark humor. Dangerously outrageous hairdos. The feeling that you’re watching a vintage film noir story run through a Looney Tunes filter. You are in the presence of a Coen brothers movie — whaddaya need, a road map?!

Actually, some sort of GPS system would be a blessing for both you, the viewer, and the makers of Drive-Away Dolls, one of whom is indeed a Coen. Along with his brother Joel, Ethan Coen spent close to four decades as one half of a filmmaking duo that became synonymous with a certain type of moviegoing experience. The work might be manic and comedic (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading), or menacing and head-scatchingly existential (Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, No Country For Old Men). If you got lucky, it could be both (Barton Fink, Fargo, A Serious Man). Even before the siblings decided to pursue separate projects behind the camera, Ethan had a vibrant creative life outside of the partnership, having written plays, poetry, and a collection of short stories. Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, the 2022 doc on the rock & roll legend he made with his wife/editor Tricia Cooke, suggested he could work a nice side hustle as a portrait artist if he wanted to.

This second collaboration between Coen and Cooke, from a script the two had worked on together back in the late 1990s, treads into some extremely recognizable territory. It’s Philadelphia, 1999. A man (Pedro Pascal) walks into a bar. He’s carrying a briefcase. When the person he meets doesn’t show up, he ducks into an alleyway and is forcibly relieved of his package. Soon, a well-tailored gangster (we love you, Colman Domingo) and two dim-witted thugs (C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick) show up at a business that specializes in hiring folks to drive vehicles to a certain location. They’re going to deliver the briefcase to a client in Tallahassee, Florida. Can the proprietor pass them the item they sent over the day before, pretty please?

The problem is, the shop’s easily confused owner (Bill Camp) thought that two young women who came in earlier, asking about a “drive-away” ride to the Sunshine State, were the ones making the drop. The crooks now have to find the duo who unwittingly took off with the package and retrieve it. This is the part where you expect an incoming slew of hot interstate pursuits, close calls, the type of ha-ha-bang-bang that’s become a Coen-production signature, thrills, spills and/or some chills. Added elements may include a dirty politician, a severed head in a basket, and a number of highbrow references — say, the novels of Henry James — butting up against a blizzard of dick jokes. The legacy of the Plaster Casters plays a part. Beanie Feldstein shows up as a perpetually angry cop. Matt Damon drops by for a cameo, thanks to an industry mandate stating that one out of every five movies must feature a Matt Damon cameo.

There’s one thing that separates Drive-Away Dolls from the usual pulp-fiction deconstruction template that the brothers had perfected in the past, however. It’s the extraordinary amount of glorious, out-and-proud queerness that’s embedded into the story, something that you’d be at pains to find in their previous work. Cooke identifies as a lesbian (she and Ethan have what they‘ve deemed a nontraditional relationship) and had mentioned at a recent Q&A that she started throwing around ideas for this partially out of frustration over not seeing a certain type of representation onscreen. She’s also namechecked Russ Meyers’ exploitation masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! as a touchstone, and you can see the influence of a certain era’s primal-screen pleasures all over this. The original title, Cooke said, was Drive-Away Dykes, which purposefully suggests the second half of a Forty-Deuce grindhouse double bill. Judges would’ve also accepted Drive-In Dolls as well. It takes place in the Nineties and benefits from the 21st century’s sex-positivity, but wow, does this have late Sixties/early Seventies B movie envy all over it!

But it’s the two LGBTQ lead characters, young and inadvertently on the run, that provide what little fuel is in the tank here. Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a bookish introvert and hasn’t been intimate with anyone since a breakup with a girlfriend several years prior. Her best friend, Jamie (Margaret Qualley), is a Texas ex-pat in Philly who lives for impromptu hook-ups and body shots at the local bar. The first thing that Jamie does after she invites herself along to Marian’s trip south to see her mom is map out every LGBTQ hotspot on the route. She’s determined to make sure her friend enjoys the more carnal side of life on the trip, be it in a small town’s resident lesbian hangout or at a female soccer team’s basement party. This is a movie that is anything but shy about sex and is a strong contender for having the most dildo-related punchlines per capita than any film released in the last 75 years. The tension between these young women is less will-they-or-won’t-they, so much as how steamy things might get. (Spoiler: Literally steamy at one point.)

So why does Drive-Away Dolls constantly feel like it’s behind the wheel of the wrong make and model for its intended destination? Part of it is the delivery system — there’s no one more qualified to make a Coenesque film than a genuine Coen brother, yet the mix of cracked noir tropes and a sapphic take on a vintage sexcapade flick feels like the cinematic equivalent of a bad blind date. Neither of the movies going on here syncs up, which makes the kooky crime elements and the buddy-comedy storyline feel like they’re jockeying for space. Only Qualley seems to realize that she’s in a romp made by one half of the team behind O Brother Where Art Thou?, and is consistently trying to amp up the Lone Star lilt, the volume and the velocity of this variation on the screwball “dizzy dame” archetype. Meanwhile, Viswanathan — as delightful a comic dynamo as you’ll find these days — is given a mousy, uptight character that struggles to be even one-dimensional.

The necessary fire-and-ice chemistry never takes. Neither, for that matter, do the psychedelic interludes straight out of a Fillmore concert and flop-sweat attempts at blood-flecked zaniness. You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile. We weren’t joking about the GPS — Drive-Away Dolls is a mash-up that needs a sense of direction, and badly.