Honey Don't!

The Grime and the Glamour of Bakersfield

I’m beginning to suspect Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke are mostly interested in seeing whether the rest of us can keep pace. Their so-called "lesbian B-movie trilogy" started last year with *Drive-Away Dolls*, which felt like a sugar-rushed swerve. Now *Honey Don't!* arrives and trades highway chaos for a sun-blasted, vaguely desolate Bakersfield neo-noir. It’s an odd movie, no question. I’m still unconvinced it hangs together as a mystery in the usual sense, but that also seems beside the point.



The story, if that word even quite fits, is all hardboiled fragments, detours, and false leads. Margaret Qualley plays Honey O'Donahue, a local private eye who still favors a Rolodex and carries quarters for pay phones. After a young woman is found dead in an overturned car in Antelope Canyon, Honey starts tugging at clues that lead to the Four-Way Temple, a church that also happens to function as a drug-trafficking operation. Coen and Cooke push hard on their Bogart and Altman influences, sketching a version of California that has nothing to do with glamour and everything to do with cheap motels and strip-mall fatigue. The film looks right. The mood is there. The engine, though, coughs now and then.

There’s an early scene that lays out the movie’s whole wavelength. Honey stands over the wreck in the canyon, statuesque in high-waisted slacks and heels. Nearby, Marty (Charlie Day), a local homicide detective, is so busy fumbling through a flirtation with a woman who has already told him more than once that she likes girls that he barely registers the corpse. Qualley doesn’t waste energy on an eye roll. She just looks at him with that dead, drained expression of someone who has already spent too much time on fools. The joke isn’t really that she’s a woman in a male-dominated space. It’s that most of the men around her barely merit the effort.



Qualley keeps the movie from drifting away completely. After so many performances built on jittery movement and manic energy, it’s striking to watch her sink into this kind of low-key, heavy-eyed cynicism. She barely has to move. Everything feels measured, watchful, almost predatory. The film really comes alive in her scenes with Aubrey Plaza, who plays a sharply combative local cop named MG Falcone. The two of them orbit each other with this brittle, guarded rhythm that eventually turns into real heat.

Then there’s Chris Evans. If anyone wondered where all that post-Captain America goodwill might go, apparently the answer is straight into the furnace. As Reverend Drew Devlin, Evans plays a slick, sex-fixated cult leader using his church to move narcotics for "the French." He ditches every trace of upright heroism. He slumps. He grins. He turns that all-American face into something greasy and hollow. It’s a ludicrous performance in the best way, and a very funny one too. You come away wishing he’d gone villainous sooner.



Whether any of that is enough for a full ninety minutes will mostly come down to your tolerance for shaggy pulp. The script can feel less like a story than a pile of moods and stylistic habits looking for something sturdier to hold onto. Then again, maybe that looseness is the appeal. As /Film’s Bill Bria noted, "It’s Qualley who takes the reins of the film so thoroughly that it’d still be a pleasure to watch even if there were no one else in it." He’s right. *Honey Don't!* is messy, uneven, and at times pretty maddening, but it never goes flat. Sometimes it’s enough just to watch a handful of very good actors stomp around in the dirt and call that the mystery.