Jamie loves sex—especially when it comes to sex with women and particularly when it involves dildos. Jamie also loves to talk. She’s from Texas, which means she loves letting certain words drip out of her mouth as much as she loves hearing them. And with nary a mean bone in her body, Jamie is a delight. The world could use more Jamies.

Full of energy, wisecracks, and always one step ahead of everyone else, Margaret Qualley plays Jamie like Bugs Bunny, if Bugs Bunny was a self-loving lesbian with a predilection for dildos. I’ve used that word twice now, and not arbitrarily. I just want you to know what you’re getting into. Drive-Away Dolls is a lot of fun—cartoonish fun with silly flip-screen transitions and a bizarre 1960s psychedelic love scene—but it’s bound to put some people off.

Part of that might be because Drive-Away Dolls’ fixation on lesbian sex and dildos might be curious coming from writer/director Ethan Coen. Though Coen—typically paired with brother Joel—has been here before. Movies like Burn After Reading, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are peppered with buffoons, fools, and clowns. They also contain some of the most earnest and fully-conceived characters you’re likely to meet. No one in a Coen movie feels tossed off, and that remains true in Drive-Away Dolls, right down to Curlie (Bill Camp), who runs the titular drive-away service.

The year is 1999 and the place is Philadelphia, sometime around Christmas. Jamie needs to get out of dodge because her live-in girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein) caught her cheating one time too many. So Jamie recruits Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), her buttoned-up friend who hasn’t been laid in four years, to use a drive-away service to go to Tallahassee, Florida. Drive-away services are like a car service on demand: A car needs to be somewhere, and someone needs to drive it there. That’s where Curlie enters the picture and that’s how Jamie and Marian come to drive a car with some very precious cargo in the trunk.

What makes this cargo so precious? I won’t tell you, but I bet you can guess. Some pretty big movers and shakers want what Jamie and Marian have in the trunk, which is why Flint (C.J. Wilson) and Arliss (Joey Slotnick) are charged with tracking Jamie and Marian down and recovering it. They’re a couple of real bright boys: one dimwitted and slow, the other snappy and self-satisfied. They’re meant to mirror Jamie and Marian’s opposites attract dynamic. Honestly, they made me think of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare’s characters in Fargo more—particularly the scene where they argue about whether they should get prostitutes or pancakes first.

There’s a lot of doubling in Drive-Away Dolls. The movie opens in a bar with a low-tracking shot that reveals a man holding a very important briefcase. An hour and change later, that same tracking shot is in another bar and finds another man clutching another very important briefcase. Two characters read the same Henry James novel, and exchanges are played twice, often both times for humor. It’s clever, it’s intentional, and it’s obvious. It also feels kind of lazy. It feels a little like Coen has collected a grab bag of his and his brother’s greatest hits—does Pedro Pascal’s sniveling bagman end up in the same dark alley Oscar Issac’s Llewyn Davis did?—to make a Coen brothers pastiche, this time with sex-loving lesbians and, yes, dildos a-plenty.

The answer might lie in the movie’s co-author and editor, Tricia Cooke, who wrote the script with her husband, Ethan. In an interview with MovieMaker, Cooke talks about her life as a queer woman—she and Coen have other partners—while also raising their two children and working together. Drive-Away Dolls, or, if you prefer the alternate title, Drive-Away Dykes (doubling again), stems from that relationship while also having a lot of fun.

The world is a wacky place when you stop and think about it. And sometimes, that wackiness invades some of the most serious corners and produces some of the most crucial outcomes. But it’s still wacky—especially when dildos are involved.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
Directed by Ethan Coen
Screenplay by Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
Produced by Tim Bevan, Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke, Eric Fellner, Robert Graf
Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, Matt Damon
Focus Features, Rated R, Running time 84 minutes, Opens Feb. 23, 2024

---