'Honey Don't!' is a neo-noir with a modern, queer sensibility

The most frustrating kind of film is one where you can see promising elements almost coming together, but never quite getting there. “Honey Don’t!” is the second in a proposed trilogy of so-called “lesbian B-movies” from the husband and wife team of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. (According to the credits, he directs, she edits and they both write, though it sounds like the collaboration is a lot more fluid in practice.) There are some amusing moments, a few intriguing ideas and a knockout movie star performance from Margaret Qualley as an aloof, no-nonsense private eye. But almost nothing in the picture connects. This weirdly inert neo-noir just lies there on the screen, baking in the California desert sun.

Coen, Cooke and Qualley previously teamed up for last year’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” a bawdy, ramshackle farce chronicling a cross-country chase to recover a stolen suitcase full of plaster penises. Qualley’s horny motormouth rattled off Coen and Cooke’s tongue-twisting dialogue with such aplomb it’s initially a shock to see how dialed-down and cool she is in their follow-up. Her Honey O’Donahue is a Sapphic spin on the private dicks once played by Humphrey Bogart, laconically quipping her way into crime scenes while wearing fire engine red lipstick and stiletto heels. (She’s channeling Bogie, but in Lauren Bacall’s high-waisted slacks.)

Honey’s one of those old-timey P.I.s who drives a vintage muscle car and keeps a manual Rolodex. She’s such a walking anachronism, it’s a little jarring whenever the movie reminds us that it’s taking place in the present day — like when she subdues a redneck attacker with a shotgun and slaps a “I Have A Vagina And I Vote” sticker over the MAGA decal on his pickup truck. Charlie Day is pretty funny as a dim-bulb cop who won’t stop hitting on her. No matter how many times Honey tells him she likes girls, he doesn’t seem to hear it. But then a lot of guys in the movie don’t listen to a word she says.

After a would-be client is killed in a car crash on her way to their first meeting, Honey starts snooping around, suspicious of the dead girl’s connection to a venal preacher played by a badly miscast Chris Evans. There’s some to-do with a French drug cartel and a Vespa-riding hitwoman with flirty eyes, but the only surprise in this mystery is that pretty much everything turns out to be exactly as it seems. This is uncharacteristic coming from Coen, who once upon a time, with his brother Joel, co-authored some of the twistiest crime stories in all of cinema. By contrast, “Honey Don’t!” suffers from serious first-draft energy.

The movie is more interesting as a character study, stirring to life during tangentially related scenes about Honey’s domestic and romantic entanglements, which she tries her best to keep compartmentalized. When not helping out her sister (Kristen Connolly), a single mom who lives in a trailer and has too many kids, Honey sneaks off for no-strings hookups with girls around town. She keeps coming back to a surly policewoman MG Falcone, played with a wounded edge by Aubrey Plaza. Despite the parameters of their arrangement, the two women find themselves falling for each other.

Qualley and Plaza are so good together you’ll wish the movie had more time for them. The actresses throw themselves into the characters’ carnal connection, gradually getting romantic in spite of themselves. “I like first date stuff,” says MG with a lascivious gleam in her eye, letting her hands drift below the bar where they’re sitting during a steamy early encounter. “Honey Don’t!” is a fairly explicit picture by contemporary standards, though the most transgressive moment might be how matter-of-factly the movie regards Qualley washing anal beads in her kitchen sink the morning after their first tryst. (Between this and “Drive-Away Dolls,” Coen and Cooke are doing for sex toys what Michael Bay did for Transformers.)

Plaza in particular keeps pushing the movie into a moodier, more melancholic register, so it's a drag whenever we cut back to Evans overacting as a thinly written, perverted pastor. In a screenplay where every character is recovering from some sort of bad dad or toxic patriarch, his Rev. Drew is clearly designed to be the worst of the worst, luring runaways and vulnerable young women into a safe space that he sexually exploits.

But he’s played as such a lightweight buffoon that the threat never lands — not even when we see him shooting people. Admittedly, this is a failure of Coen’s direction as much as Evans’ cartoony performance, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much the movie would have improved were he also allowed to be a little scary. (Someone like Michael Shannon could have crushed this role.) Similarly, the head-scratching resolution of Honey and MG’s relationship needed a whole lot more screen time to make any sense. It comes out of left field.

The small-time Bakersfield setting and personal stakes of the story give “Honey Don’t!” the briskness of an old pulp novel, albeit one skewed to a more modern, queer sensibility. Yet the film feels too slapdash to get a handle on, like Coen and Cooke started shooting before they’d fully figured out what story they were trying to tell. The tossed-off nonchalance of “Drive-Away Dolls” was part of its charm, here it just feels like laziness.

“It’s time to get the band back together,” someone sighed as the lights came up after the press screening. Indeed, I have colleagues who took the Coen brothers’ professional parting harder than their own parents’ divorces, and it doesn’t help that in their solo outings we’re increasingly able to see what each sibling brought to the table. A little of the moody grandeur with which Joel directed 2021’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” would have gone a long way toward making “Honey Don’t!” feel more substantial. I mentioned the movie to a friend who groaned, “I don’t want to go to a Garfunkel concert.”

Me neither. But come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind reading a Honey O’Donahue paperback or two.

“Honey Don’t!” is now in theaters.