Margaret Qualley, star of Drive-Away Dolls.

Teguan Harris

Debuting as a solo director, Ethan Coen and wife Tricia Cooke have teamed up to co-write the new thriller/comedy Drive-Away Dolls (2024). Is it as bad as critics claim, or are queer films held to an unfair standard?

Starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, Drive-Away Dolls is a comedy about sapphic best friends, Jamie and Marian, who embark on a road trip. Venturing to Tallahassee, Florida, with a thirst for lesbian sex, something sinister lurks in their car boot…

Alongside Qualley and Viswanathan, the star-studded cast features Beanie Feldstein, Matt Damon and 2024 Oscar-nominee, Colman Domingo. Pedro Pascal and Miley Cyrus also feature in cameo appearances.

Told through trippy, dreamy sequences and rife with sexual innuendos, Jamie and Marian’s road trip is far from ordinary. 

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Drive-Away Dolls Plot

Drive-Away Dolls opens in Philadelphia in 1999, where a man named Santos (Pascal) exits a bar with a briefcase. A bartender follows him and decapitates him in an alleyway. Brutal.

Jamie (Qualley) cheats on her girlfriend and cop, Sukie (Feldstein), who kicks Jamie out. Marian (Viswanathan) plans a road trip to Tallahassee where Jamie decides to tag along.

“The girls encounter a flat tyre after entering Florida, where they find a briefcase full of dildos after checking the car boot.”

Spliced with electrifying lesbian encounters, danger follows the best friends. Jamie and Marian accidentally took the car that belonged to criminals Arliss (Joey Slotnick), Flint (C.J. Wilson) and The Chief (Domingo). The trio follows Jamie and Marian, who are unaware of the illegal dealings in the car boot.

After encountering a flat tyre, they open the car boot and find a briefcase, a smoky white substance and a basket that contains Santos’ head. When the pair opens the briefcase, they find dildos casted out of plaster from men’s penises, including that of Senator Gary Channel (Damon).

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Libido, Henry James and Dildos

“Coen and Tricia prove that it is more than okay to make fun and trashy lesbian movies.”

Marian planned a trip to Tallahassee to visit her aunt. However, Jamie has another thing in mind: getting Marian laid.

Gripping onto her copy of Henry James’ The Europeans (1878), Marian is more reserved. Jamie, by contrast, embraces sex and pleasure, actively pursuing casual hookups at lesbian bars. On their way to Tallahassee, Jamie encourages Marian, who hasn’t had sex in a while, to loosen up.

Marian slowly starts to come out of her shell when the pair make out with other female football players during a game at a party. Marian storms off when the women rotate and she has to make out with Jamie, indicating that she harbours feelings for her best friend.

The girls encounter a flat tyre after entering Florida, where they find a briefcase full of dildos after checking the car boot.

Marian starts to loosen up after the friends check in at a hotel. They share a kiss, and Marian starts vocalising her desires. The two have sex in the shower after Marian tells Jamie that she wants to use the dildos.

With both Marian and Jamie using them for their own pleasure, the dildos are symbolic of a key theme of the movie: women have libidos too!

Henry James’ The Europeans is also an important symbol in Drive-Away Dolls. Marian begins reading the book at the start of the movie, when she is more reserved and not sexually active. She finished the book at the film’s conclusion, having broken out of her shell and begun facing her sexual desires.

“Trashy movies don’t get a fair shake from critics”

As argued by screenwriter and editor Tricia Cooke, Drive-Away Dolls “doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be a little messy and sloppy.” In an interview with Mashable, Cooke said “We wanted it to be kind of playful and sexual.”

The film had several sources of inspiration, from Cooke’s queer youth in New York City’s lesbian bars in the 1980s, to lesbian classics like But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and Go Fish (1994).

Despite being released in 2024, the movie has been on the shelves for years. Cooke and Coen wrote the movie around two decades ago and it was nearly produced. The movie originally starred Legally Blonde‘s Selma Blair and Holly Hunter as the cop ex-girlfriend.

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Cooke claimed that it was “near impossible” to find the budget for a lesbian movie that wasn’t “important” or “serious” enough, like But I’m a Cheerleader. “Maybe [trashy movies] don’t get a fair shake from critics because maybe there’s some premium on importance,” Coen added.

Coen and Cooke intended to have fun with the movie. Coen told Empire: “Neither of us was going to make a mopey lesbian movie, not being capable of that.

“There are movies about the pain of being gay. That can be a good movie or a bad movie, like any other, but that is not something we were going to do. We have people for that.”

Lesbian Movies Don’t Have To Be Serious

Coen and Tricia prove that it is more than okay to make fun and trashy lesbian movies.

2023 saw many lesbian films that were fun and trashy. Bottoms and Dicks: The Musical were undeniably popular among their queer audiences.

Drive-Away Dolls is another hilarious and fun lesbian movie. It explores women’s pleasure and the fun of lesbian sex. And most importantly, that queer movies don’t have to be serious or depressing!

With a second movie, Honey Don’t! starring Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza, in the works, it’s safe to say it’s an exciting time for queer cinema.

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Featured image courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Flickr. No changes were made to the image. Image licence found here.

Writer and journalist. University graduate in English Literature. Book reader, word lover and Notion enthusiast.

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