'Drive-Away Dolls' Review: Trash Fun, Extremely Disposable

It's fascinating that Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, spouses and longtime film collaborators, and the creative team behind the exploitation film “Drive-Away Dolls,” have repeatedly (and lovingly) described their new film as “trash.” in interviews. It's a way to nod to influences like the “Garbage Pope” himself, John Waters, and the exciting king of B movies, Russ Meyer. Or maybe it's a way to get ahead of and get away from certain expectations attached to Coen and his former film partner, his brother Joel. After all, this isn't your dad's “No Country for Old Men.”

“Drive-Away Dolls” quite enthusiastically asserts a space that one could call “a country for young lesbians,” if they so desired. The film itself is a “queering” of the '90s crime caper, the kind of sardonic, ironic, muscular, oh-so-masculine film that the Coen Brothers and their contemporaries (Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, et al.) popularized. About three decades ago, giving rise to generations of cinema brothers.

Coen and Cooke wrote the film together and essentially co-directed it, although only Coen is credited as director, with Cooke as editor (she also edited “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” with the brothers). The script, written about 20 years ago, originated in Cooke's queer youth in New York City lesbian bars and has been on the back burner for years. The setting of these events in 1999 is both a reflection of the script's age and an inadvertent throwback to the types of films it references. With its rapid-fire deadpan dialogue, low canted angles, wry, detached violence, and eccentric transitional touches, it feels self-consciously retro, even if it was, at one point, intended to be contemporary.

The plot centers on an unlikely pair of friends: Jamie (Margaret Qualley), a loving Lothario lesbian, and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), a buttoned-up office worker, who decide to drive to Tallahassee, Florida, when Jamie catches too much. She heats him up for cheating on her ex-cop, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). The friends opt for a cheap rental car and are accidentally given a vehicle with a secret stash in the trunk, triggering a chase across state lines involving a senatorial sex scandal. And even though they have two bumbling henchmen chasing them, these friends live, laugh, and fall in love with every Sapphic saloon south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

It's “Pulp Fiction” on dildos, and it's unashamedly slutty and focused on female pleasure. Still, you can't ignore the nagging feeling, at times, that “Drive-Away Dolls” simply feels like the lesbian porn parody of a multi-guy crime comedy. A basement makeout party hosted by a women's soccer team is a bit of a stretch, but so is the extremely silly sex scandal that animates the entire plot. The film is often crude in a cringe-worthy way, but it's also packed with jokes and moves at such a fast pace (it's a mere 85 minutes) that it's over before you realize what hit you.

Qualley and Viswanathan are fantastically committed and charismatic, with the former demonstrating a capacity for broad comedy. Viswanathan is lethally precise in his lines. But he opens the hood of the story and it turns out that this whisk is a lemon: the plot mechanics simply do not exist. How or even why are these two friends? Colman Domingo snarls attractively like some kind of crime boss, but who is his character? What are the risks of this scandal and why should we care? Does plot device A insert into story element B? Maybe not, and maybe no one cares whether this jumble of funny parts forms a coherent whole.

The light and sparse “Drive-Away Dolls” could dissipate in a gust of wind, but it's better than a hasty getaway before that becomes a problem. While its story fails to justify its own existence, it delivers what it says on the tin: silly, horny fun, even if that seems retrograde in more ways than one.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.