‘Honey Don’t!’ review: Margaret Qualley smolders in Ethan Coen’s neo-noir

Margaret Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue in “Honey Don’t!” (Karen Kuehn/Focus Features/TNS)

Chris Evans in a scene from “Honey Don’t!” (Focus Features via AP)

Charlie Day in a scene from “Honey Don’t!” (Focus Features via AP)

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Margaret Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue in “Honey Don’t!” (Karen Kuehn/Focus Features/TNS)

“Honey Don’t!” is a dead-end plot that exists to take us on a tour through a who’s who of scoundrels and eccentrics. Luckily for us, that describes a lot of the best movies director Ethan Coen made with his brother Joel, including “Burn After Reading” and “The Big Lebowski,” so we’re in good hands.

There’s something admirable, in an obstinate way, about Coen choosing to make lesbian B-movies that clock in at under 90 minutes as his first and second solo features following his creative split with Joel in 2018. His first was last year’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” which also starred Margaret Qualley in the lead role, and he’s apparently planning a third in the same vein. This is sort of like when Bob Dylan spent the bulk of the 2010s recording sprawling albums of Frank Sinatra standards, or when Francis Bacon spent the ’50s painting screaming popes.

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In “Honey Don’t!”, Coen and co-writer Tricia Cooke paint in the ketchup-red and sepia tones of mid-century Americana, as filtered through sleazy crime novels and hot rod fantasies like “American Graffiti.” If not for a stray reference to COVID, you might think it took place in the early ‘60s. The movie’s world is gleefully anachronistic, and the characters even comment on that fact from time to time.

Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator in Bakersfield who we meet as she strides in high heels down a gravel embankment to the site of a car crash.

She has reason to believe that the crash wasn’t accidental, but she withholds this information from the cops, led by a homicide detective (Charlie Day) who assumes the affectations of a ‘50s straight arrow even as we detect traces of Day’s feral “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” character snuffling underneath. He’s the only character in the movie who seems to have trouble processing Honey’s lesbianism, which is otherwise treated matter-of-factly, not least in a scene where she and a cop played by Aubrey Plaza do things to each other in a bar that would get them arrested in real life.

From there, the plot pretzels itself into typical noir convolution, giving us an excuse to meet all sorts of characters, not least a shady local preacher played by Chris Evans, who uses his almost embarrassingly all-American good looks to convey treacle and snake oil. He takes troubled women under his wing and seduces them, leading to some truly grotesque sex scenes whose harsh lighting underlines their unwholesomeness, in contrast to the analog ‘70s mood lighting under which Qualley conducts her own trysts.

Qualley is tall, dark and striking, with the poise of a rockabilly star like Wanda Jackson, whose version of the Carl Perkins standard “Honey Don’t” we hear on the soundtrack, but she’s perhaps slightly too ethereal to sell the pulpy noir dialogue she’s provided with. There’s something intriguingly unreal about her character, who drifts through the modern world carrying a bag of quarters to use at payphones and who seems remarkably gifted at closing herself off from her emotions (we start to understand why when her estranged father shows up in town). She drinks but never seems to get drunk and gets injured but never really seems hurt. Is she a spirit, a ghost, a hallucination? That would explain the bar scene.

“Honey Don’t!” runs 89 minutes but is far from lean, with many of its subplots going up in smoke before the viewer has a chance to get involved. This describes “The Big Lebowski” and a lot of other noirs, especially in the revisionist school (“The Long Goodbye,” “Inherent Vice”) that leans into the genre’s emphasis on attitude at the expense of plot, but something about “Honey Don’t!” holds it back from really creating a world of its own. Maybe it’s the short length, or the fact that the dialogue only smolders when it should snap, or maybe just that Ethan’s Bakersfield feels less like a place you could get lost in than the Malibu the brothers created in “The Big Lebowski.”

Perhaps Ethan has an ace up his sleeve, and the third installment will leave its predecessors in its dust. For now, it’s fascinating to see one-half of one of cinema’s greatest partnerships so assured about what kind of films he wants to make this early in his solo career.