Drive-Away Dolls is a B-Movie Delight!

Turns out a Coen Brother movie is pretty damn nifty as well!

When I was a film critic at The A.V. Club and then The Dissolve, one of my great joys was watching the new Coen Brothers movie. The Coen Brothers made movies so rich, deep and so dense with glorious details that you needed to see all of them, with the notable exception of The Ladykillers, the brother’s only lousy movie, more than once. 

Once is almost never enough for a Coen Brothers movie. They make movies to get lost in, timeless masterpieces that reveal glistening new details the 10th, 11th, or 12th time around. 

Most of the Coen Brothers’ movies deserved to be seen over and over and over again. They were the most dependable of filmmaking teams until they recently decided to work separately. Why? Yoko Ono. I’m unsure how, but she is also responsible for breaking up the Coen Brothers. 

Damn that woman! 

Joel directed the well-received 2021 William Shakespeare adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan made his solo debut with the 2022 documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind and is now following it up with the raucous retro black comedy Drive-Away Dolls. 

The highest possible praise I can give Drive-Away Dolls, or any movie, really, is that it feels like a vintage Coen Brothers movie even though it was co-written by Tricia Cooke, Ethan’s wife, rather than Joel. Cooke also co-produced and edited the film, so this isn’t quite the solo endeavor it might have been without Joel’s wife contributing so much in so many different areas. 

The big difference is that Drive-Away Dolls is substantially gayer and hornier than the Coen Brothers’ usual fare, which is not particularly gay or horny but is great all the same. 

Drive-Away Dolls is fueled by sapphic sensuality. It’s the story of two very different women on a rollicking, romp-fueled road trip of self-discovery. It’s also a hard-boiled tale of extremely dim career criminals. In this world, criminality is often born of rank stupidity. Our heroines are able to outsmart the bad guys mainly because they’re idiots. 

Margaret Qualley, who is as talented, magnetic, and wildly charismatic as her mother Andie MacDowell is dull, stars as Jamie. She’s less an unusually, spectacularly sexy young woman than sexuality incarnate. 

Jamie knows exactly how desirable she is and is intent on making the most of her youth and beauty, primarily by having sex with as many women as possible. 

Jamie’s perpetually apoplectic cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) is all too aware of the affect that Jamie’s roaring, rampaging sexuality has on her peers within the lesbian community. It drives her to a place of homicidal rage. 

When Sukie ejects Jamie from her apartment for flagrant infidelities, the sex bomb decides to embark on a road trip to Tallahassee, Florida, with her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). 

Marian is the antithesis of Jamie. She’s the uptight, self-conscious id to Jamie’s id. Jamie is all libido and sapphic sensuality. Jamie lives for sex. Marian would prefer to forget that sex exists. 

Marian’s idea of a good time involves reading Henry James’ The Americans, yet these women set out on a road trip in pre-Y2K America that will change both of their lives forever. 

That’s partially due to their experiences on the road and partly because they accidentally end up in a car with the disembodied head of Santos (Pedro Pascal, in a memorable cameo) in the trunk. 

This upsets crime kingpin Chief (Colman Domingo). He dispatches flunkies Arliss (Joey Slotnik) and Flint (C.J. Wilson) to find the girls and retrieve what’s in the trunk. 

One of the Coen Brothers’ great strengths is their ability to create indelible, unforgettable characters with minimal dialogue and screen time. 

That gift is very much in evidence here. One of my favorite performances in the film is from Bill Camp as Curley, the dim-witted doofus who gave the wrong car to Jamie and Marian. He has maybe ten lines of dialogue and five minutes of screen time, but he’s so poignantly pathetic and clueless that he’s both hilarious and heartbreaking. 

Jamie uses the road as it was intended: as a place to seek out anonymous casual sex, but Marian has a hard time pretending that she’s not hurt when her friend brings lovers to the motel room they share. 

At some point, dildos handcrafted from the penises of some of our nation’s most distinguished power-brokers, most notably a conservative politician played by Matt Damon, who will do anything to keep the world from knowing that many years back a Cynthia Plaster Caster-like artist played by Miley Cyrus made a cast of his dong and the dongs of many others power brokers. 

ItDrive-Away Dolls is a souped-up 1970s-style exploitation movie elevated to the level of pop art by Coen and Cooke’s fiendishly clever screenplay. It’s the kind of thing that should be seen on a drive-in in 1976 after a Roger Corman cheapie, but it’s a blast no matter where you see it. 

Viswanathan and Qualley have tremendous comic, romantic, and sexual chemistry. Viswanathan is a wonderful straight woman (so to speak), an inspired comic foil to her wildcard co-star. 

As Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat chronicled in song, opposites attract. Drive-Away Dolls is a raucous B-movie exploitation throwback with that distinctive Coen Brother flair, but it’s also a love story. 

It’s a love story with Congressional dildos, collegiate lesbian orgies, and a dead head in a bag, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

The Coen Brothers were one of the great brother duos in all of entertainment but I’m very excited about the prospect of these singular talents striking out on their own. 

Four stars out of Five