'Drive-Away Dolls' review: Lesbian comic road trip caper pops a tire

Ethan Coen's erratic comic road trip "Drive-Away Dolls" features the severed head of one of the internet's most beloved actors, a mysterious briefcase, hallucinatory visions of an A-list pop star and a wayward plot that is out for an aimless joyride.

This is a loose caper of a movie, in the spirit of Coen Brothers comedies such as "Burn After Reading" or "The Ladykillers," low-stakes stories about lowlife criminals and those who get caught up in their wake. It's a hit-or-miss tale that's more miss than hit, as the parts that usually come together in the Coen world don't add up to much this time around.

Following his 2022 documentary "Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind," "Drive-Away Dolls" is Coen's first narrative feature without his brother Joel at his side, as the pair effectively went solo following 2018's "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs." (It happens; even Oasis broke up.) A reunion appears to be on the horizon, but for now Coen teams with his wife Tricia Cooke, a longtime editor on the brothers' films, who scripts this gonzo lesbian adventure where the point is the journey, not the destination, if there's much of a point at all.

Margaret Qualley, doing a backwoods Southern accent that's like an exaggerated 1950s television actor's impersonation of a backwoods Southern accent, is Jamie, a carefree twentysomething who recruits her buttoned up friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) to go on a road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. She wants to loosen her up and maybe help her get laid while they skip town for a few days, hitting every dive-y gay bar along their route. They decide to take a drive-away service vehicle but end up in the wrong guy's car, and they become targets for a group of bumbling criminals, the kind of bickering idiots Coen has been helping bring to life for 40 years.

They include Chief (Colman Domingo), a crime boss, and his loose cannon right hand goons Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C. J. Wilson). They're after a decapitated head — no spoilers per se, but let's just say Pedro Pascal appears in the first scene and only, er, parts of him appear afterward — and a briefcase, the contents of which could potentially compromise a high profile political figure, even if the particulars of how are never really ironed out.

There are scattered laughs but not a lot of cohesion in the storytelling, as Coen fashions "Drive-Away Dolls" as a kind-of randy exploitation programmer that might appear as the second half of a drive-in double feature. (It runs just 84 minutes, a perfect length for its low-hanging ambitions.) It's set in 1999, not for any evident reason, other than it makes sense for characters to employ the use of road maps rather than smart phones; as technology becomes more integrated into all of our daily lives, any film set prior to 2006 now has the feel of an era entirely removed from our own.

Qualley's wide-eyed cartoon of a character has a voracious appetite for life, and the actress has a ball playing her, even if she seems to exist on an entirely different astral plane than Viswanathan's more conservative, Henry James-reading bookworm; when it's called for the two of them to have chemistry together, the movie sputters like it's running low on gas.

Further, Beanie Feldstein plays Jamie's ex-, Sukie, a cop who never quite fits into the story but barges her way into it at several spots anyway. A few other familiar faces show up along the way, which contributes to the movie's freewheeling, hey-whatever spirit, but never help it add up to anything more than what feels like a tossed-off side project.

There have been Coen movies in the past that have felt similar on first-viewing; "The Big Lebowski" was famously hard to crack on initial release, and only later revealed itself to be a rewatchable classic. That could happen with "Drive-Away Dolls," but its disparate elements make that possibility feel unlikely. This mostly feels like a road trip on a flat tire.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Drive-Away Dolls'

GRADE: C

Rated R: for crude sexual content, full nudity, language and some violent content

Running time: 84 minutes

In theaters