As the eponymous heroine of Honey Don’t!, Margaret Qualley has a catch in her voice, a twinkle in her eye, and a bounce in her step: Her self-styled private eye, Honey O’Donoghue, is all about the legwork. The title of Ethan Coen’s pleasingly pulpy new comedy offers a cautionary imperative that goes unheeded by its namesake. As a spiritual descendant of female shamuses like Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski, the only way Honey knows is forward and into the fray. Her reputation precedes her in shabby, sun-baked Bakersfield as surely as the sound of her footwear across a marble floor. “Love those click-clacking heels,” observes an admirer as Honey sashays away from the evidence locker.
Honey loves them too, and the delight of Qualley’s performance in Honey Don’t! lies in its witty, vivid revision of a vintage noir archetype. Cruising through town in a series of neatly tailored ’40s-style ensembles, Honey is a throwback with progressive tendencies: the femme fatale as life force. She’s also an out lesbian who wears her orientation proudly on her blouse’s crisp white sleeves. Not only has Honey gotten good at living without attachments—she’s a serial dater who sometimes swoops in to assist her kid-infested older sister (Kristen Connolly)—but she excels at deflecting men’s attention without overtly emasculating them. The latter is a daily mandate: Pestered for a date by a smitten local detective, she tells him sweetly that she has her book club that night. It would seem that Honey has her book club most nights.
Star turns are only as good as their star, and Qualley is in fine form here. The arguably premature “it” girl status conferred on the actress after her breakthrough role as a glassy-eyed Mansonite in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood has aged well—that, and she’s clearly got discerning taste in directors. Over the past five years, Qualley has largely eschewed Hollywood dross, working instead with the sharp-elbowed likes of Claire Denis, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Coralie Fargeat. In the process, she’s staked a convincing claim as the decade’s reigning malleable auteur poppet—a trouper who never met a demanding director for whom she would not bend over backward. In The Substance, Qualley’s naturally airbrushed, statuesque presence was like its own special effect, embodying—and elongating—the myriad insecurities of Demi Moore’s fading A-lister like a sinister showbiz tulpa. Her uncanny-valley-girl affect is real; the question is whether the hypnotic qualities Qualley possesses as a camera subject ultimately disguise or enhance her acting chops.
Honey Don’t! is Qualley’s second go-around with director Coen. The first, 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, was a screwball road-trip romance, with Qualley styling herself—impressively, if also a bit exhaustingly—as a live-action Looney Tune, a distaff Daffy Duck with a Southern drawl. The film was small (petite, really), but nevertheless became the subject of outsize media attention owing both to the Coen brothers’ much-publicized creative separation following 2018’s Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and the very public discussion around its co-writer-producer Tricia Cooke’s queer identity and the ways that her “nontraditional” marriage to Ethan led to the creation of a film that explicitly—in every sense of the word—foregrounded lesbian protagonists, relationships, and community.
The narrative was that Cooke, who had previously worked as an editor on several of the Coens’ features, was working as the driving force in a his-and-hers collaboration. Still, her husband’s influence on the material was obvious. The plot of Drive-Away Dolls, about a pair of doting platonic pals—played by Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan—who fall in love (and into bed) while dodging some low-rent hoodlums bent on what Marge Gunderson would call malfeasance, didn’t just channel the noirish metaphysics of the Coens’ other caper films; it clarified, beyond a shadow of a doubt, which brother had pushed for the proliferation of dildo jokes in Burn After Reading.
For many nonplussed (or downright dismissive) critics, the loose, borderline-careless construction and psychedelic interludes of Drive-Away Dolls suggested a kind of low-stakes throwaway. But the film’s good-natured carnality was also its own reward: It offered a welcome wrinkle in the neat-freak Coen canon, like a well-used set of sheets left crumpled on a motel bed. Meanwhile, the script’s strident Bush-era satire—centered on a closeted Republican politician (an uncredited Matt Damon) anxiously pushing family values in the midst of various indiscretions—is filtered through a recognizably Coen-esque critique of empty suits sweating their own dubious potency.
The proudly partisan stridency resurfaces in Honey Don’t! in a close-up of a vulgar bumper sticker being pasted over a MAGA logo while Damon’s glad-handing hypocrite is mirrored, this time with a beatific smirk, in the form of Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), the fatuous pastor whose startup, Four-Way Temple (the name is its own form of innuendo), preys systematically upon wayward girls. In a crumbling California town with a higher-than-average population of deadbeat dads (including Honey’s, a guy who lurks around the edges of the movie as one of several poster boys for sniveling male weakness), such parishioners are a growth industry.
When he’s not giving sermons rationalizing submission as self-actualization, Father Drew is tending to members of his flock one-on-one (and sometimes via threesomes), spreading his seed and his wisdom (such as it is) simultaneously. Mocking religious zealots is easy, but Evans inhabits the role with the callowness of an obvious nonbeliever, a quality made funnier in the context of Evans’s former day job as Captain America. Confronted by Honey over the death by car crash of a young female follower—one of several fatalities tied in some way to his church, an unfortunate set of events that gives the film its shape—Father Drew tries to use Christianity as a come-on, insisting that a little piety might “open [her] right up.” “I’ll stick with my dildo,” Honey replies with a practiced deadpan. “It opens me up and there isn’t a creep attached to it.”
OK, so that one is overtly emasculating; it’s also very funny, and Honey Don’t! has more good dialogue per capita than Drive-Away Dolls, from hard-boiled one-liners to offhand epigrams to left-field non sequiturs. The same esoteric sensibility that prompted the deathless utterance of the word “unguent” in Fargo and a mid-film dissertation on Frankfurt School dialectics in Hail, Caesar! now accounts for a casual name-drop of Touko Valio Laaksonen, a.k.a Tom of Finland—the Scandinavian painter and libertine whose output deeply influenced twentieth-century gay pornography. (Maude Lebowski, whose art was commended for being “strongly vaginal,” would surely recognize his work.) It helps that the film has assembled a cast of actors capable of putting some topspin on their banter, including and especially Aubrey Plaza, who plays Honey’s love interest, MG, a cop who doubles as the movie’s wary, bruised conscience. Where Honey merely perceives the myriad flaws of Bakersfield’s male population, MG seethes with a righteous, white-hot misandry, and Plaza is steely enough to almost get the film’s final act over the top—which is where Coen and Cooke are attempting to send it.
That “almost” is important: For all its very real charms—not least of which is the frank, fleshy tenor of its sex scenes—Honey Don’t! doesn’t fully work, even on its own scaled-back terms. If anything, the sub-90-minute run time doesn’t allow for enough local color or scenic detours; in tightening up their storytelling after Drive-Away Dolls, Coen and Cooke have come up with something more mechanical, in which the tail wags the shaggy dog. There’s also something uncalibrated and off-putting about the violence doled out in the home stretch—an ugliness meant, perhaps, to evoke the blood simplicity of Ethan’s salad days—and also some pretty heavy, literal-minded symbolism involving a caged bird that smacks up against its own obviousness. The point has to do with the enduring constraints of patriarchy—the flip side to the film’s more seductive (and successful) avatar of freedom, a nameless, mob-connected European seductress (Lera Abova) who rocks a leopard-print bikini, packs heat, and rides in and out of the story on a Vespa. As a putative muse and obscure object of desire, Abova’s character resembles the woman on the beach in Barton Fink and the dancer in the red dress in The Hudsucker Proxy; her peregrinations make a case for following one’s muse. With Qualley to appear in the third installment of Coen and Cooke’s proposed “lesbian B-movie trilogy” (tentatively and promisingly titled Go, Beavers!), Honey Don’t! looks set to join its predecessor as a movie worth enjoying more for the journey rather than the destination—a klutzy, click-clacking step in the right direction.